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THE ADFL Bulletin solicited responses to Dorothy James's article “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?” published in the Spring 1997 Bulletin (vol. 28, no. 3). The response has been gratifying. In both letters and article-length essays, colleagues have joined in discussing what James describes as a leadership crisis in the field of foreign languages and literatures. We hope that this forum will stimulate the continuation of this constructive discussion. We shall publish five additional responses and a reply from James in the Spring issue of the Bulletin .
DON'T say you weren't warned: Dorothy James puts forward clearly the urgent message that the viability of our departments depends on our ability to develop and maintain a coherent and integrated curriculum. Our divided houses—with lower-division language courses on the one side and upper divisions of literature or culture, often in English, on the other—constitute an untenable situation that threatens to tear us apart—quite literally, for if the foreign language and literature departments themselves concede that language can be separated from “content” courses, then there is no reason at all to protest when cost-cutting administrators arrive to separate language out altogether. They surely have other places to put it. As James well knows, language might alternatively be taught in freestanding centers, far away from the interpretive battles of the culture wars, or even outsourced altogether. It's not as if there weren't commercial alternatives to language learning (in the way that there are no similar commercial opportunities for the study of the basic sciences). Because I believe that second-language acquisition can be accomplished so much more effectively and with so much greater quality when it is closely integrated with cultural literacy, I feel that we must resist such dismantling of the language and literature structures. However, unless we begin to mind the store, to use James's apt image, it will be given away.
Minding the store means paying attention to the core sections of our business: like it or not, most students who come to us do so to learn language, and the rest of the university surely perceives our mission to include, centrally, the teaching of language. Our success therefore depends on the success of our language teaching, within an overall curriculum that pays attention to language skills, while we simultaneously convey the skills and knowledge necessary to understand the cultures we study. Of course we may also teach some courses in translation, to reach those students foolish enough not to learn the languages we study, but we should think of these as occasional service courses or recruitment opportunities, since our core business involves the undergraduates who take the time to do the work and acquire basic skills.
The problems in our departments are not new. As much as I may insist on an integrated curriculum, there is without a doubt a significant difference between a beginning class, in which basic linguistic skills are primary, and an advanced seminar, and the rewards in teaching each will certainly be different (although I want to emphasize that there are intellectual rewards for the teacher at all levels, not only at the upper ones). There has always been competition between subfields within our disciplines, and in complex colleges and universities, individuals may be called on to play different roles. None of these differences will disappear, and the point is not to imagine that the division of labor within departments ought to disappear altogether. Rather, James's suggestion is that these issues, which will always make up the texture of our professional lives, have turned into threatening weaknesses, because some of our colleagues just don't care about the store. Why not? James points toward what one might call the dual leadership situation: on the one hand, colleagues who run the daily life of the department, which is de facto tilted toward language, and, on the other, Colleagues devoted to the pursuit of professional profile through research, including, of course, publication and appearance at scholarly conferences. These two leadership groups are seen to represent different values, with potentially different consequences for the future of the departments.
I would, frankly, prefer to consider these two groups as ideal types rather than empirical sets: yes, there are two competing sets of values and priorities, but I can also think of individuals who work, and work successfully, on both sides of the fence. Therefore the issue ought to be cast as a values conflict within the faculty—resulting, in part, I would suggest, from the mechanism of reward distribution within American higher education. Whenever a university administration is interested in identifying the “leaders in the field” for the purposes of tenure evaluation, it is not searching for the best teachers of whatever discipline, just as no professor has ever been “raided” and hired away from one university to another because of charismatic classroom presence. What counts in tenure and in those key salary raises driven by market competition is research profile. It is no wonder, then, that the chair concerned with minding the shop, locally, may find his or her faculty colleagues focused on agenda designed to obtain recognition elsewhere: our house divided.
In the post-World War II era of the research university (which has, of course, set up paradigms and values that apply, with varying degrees, throughout higher education), the ultimate criterion of success has been research in the form of published scholarship. There may be a historical argument to make that that era is currently coming to an end, especially with the cutbacks in federally sponsored research and, perhaps even more, the public focus on teaching. My own estimation is that the institutional desideratum of scholarly achievement is not at all wrong, but when the pride in scholarship has been wrenched apart from the value of teaching—and in our fields, that means from language teaching—our profession has suffered, losing a moral high ground while succumbing to an arrogance with deeply deleterious consequences. How can we be training graduate students to be future scholars, while insisting that established scholars are too good to show up in the classes we ask graduate students to teach, classes that we know those students will continue to teach, should they be lucky enough to be hired? Some of the problem may be professional blindness, some may be administrative bias.
One possible correction would be to modify the tenure review system. While universities typically send out a young scholar's publications for evaluation, only a few also send out the scholar's teaching portfolios, including, for example, syllabi, course materials, and course evaluations. As an occasional reviewer in tenure cases, I have found the inclusion of such teaching material extremely useful, allowing me to come up with more complex understandings of an individual's achievements. Integrating teaching and scholarship at this career stage would be one step—surely many others would be necessary as well—toward overcoming the dual leadership situation, since it would send the message that universities do consider and value both sorts of accomplishments—or, better, that the two areas of activity are ultimately part of a single whole.
When I made this suggestion to one dean, the response I received was telling: outsiders should only review scholarship, while insiders, closer to an assistant professor's classroom, should be the sole judges of teaching. I failed then and continue to fail to see the logic of the response. Asking for an outside reading of teaching evidence hardly entails ceding judgment to an outsider, but, more important, the decanal response gave further articulation to the split to which James refers, the division between the presumably national or international business of research and the evidently merely local job of teaching. This is the real structure of the problem: not the greater emphasis on scholarship qua publication, but the further distinction that teaching has only local, and therefore somehow less, significance, white research produces “reputation” around the world. Given this spatialization of the teaching versus research distinction, no wonder no one, according to James, is staying at home, minding the shop: the real action is always elsewhere.
The distinction between teaching and research is, then, not the root of the problem. Members of an ideal faculty would do both, with perhaps a heavy dose of overlap between the two activities, but the practices remain quite distinct: some basic teaching units are (let's admit it) not made up of engrossing research topics, just as the impulses that propel research forward do not always come from the brilliant discussions of the classrooms. Yet white we can recognize that the Einheit von Forschung und Lehre , the unity of research and teaching, does not mean their thorough identity, this recognition of difference in no way implies accepting the hypertrophic separation of “research agenda” from the teaching mission. James documents how the erstwhile artisanal commitment of the scholar-teacher to the students has given way to self-serving careerism and a dismissiveness toward basic tasks. It might be useful to speculate on how the change in the profession of the college teacher closely parallels the transformation of other professions—medicine or law—over the past half century. Similar underlying processes have reshaped career structures and the associated devotion—or lack of such—of professionals to their clients. But this is part of a much larger metamorphosis of the economy: James's shop on Main Street has a hard time competing with Wal-Mart.
If the dual leadership corresponds to a conflict of values between local obligations to teaching and the greater rewards of the international profession, it echoes surely the relationship of literary criticism to the individual, so-called national literature departments. I say so-called, for Spanish is surely about more than just Spain, German more than Germany, and so on. Nevertheless, each department or discipline has historically been concerned with the cultures of specific populations, sometimes those living in defined areas, sometimes those spread across hemispheres. Yet I will claim a point (which would depend on an argument too long to make in this brief reply) that predominant literary theory in the United States has become increasingly unconcerned with location and context: every local literature, or language, is potentially reduced to an example of an international theory. Paradigms do not respect borders, of course, and literary theory is regarded as representing a more advanced and surely more mobile position than local culture. In other words, it is not only our professional behavior that is caught up in the tension between here and there, the local and the international; the very structure of our conceptual apparatus counterposes the hegemony of the theoretical to the mere examples and cases of the local. Are the home department and the national literature (“housed” in the department) equally unheimlich, uncanny? Don't say you weren't warned: as the intellectual validity accrues increasingly to the most abstract position, the tenability of structures that are fundamentally local and contingent—“national” literature departments—becomes weaker. Some in our profession may welcome a reorganization of scholarship into a new (world) order with a postnational definition, but no one should think that foreign language learning or learning about other cultures will then increase. On the contrary, a homogenized department will only accelerate processes of abstraction—processes that, ultimately, mean the reduction and disappearance of teaching about, and research on, other cultures, the end of our mission. We should resist: we should defend the independence of foreign language and literature departments against their amalgamation into universalizing units, since they are nearly the only placeholders of otherness, of knowledge of other cultures, in the American university, and these departments are threatened, on the professional and the conceptual level, by processes that pull us away from local knowledge and engagement.
Local knowledge is cultural knowledge, and it is inseparable from linguistic specificity. I believe I am in agreement with James on this basic approach, which is really the formula for an integrated curriculum. We may, however, differ a bit on the status of culture in teaching. She reminisces, just as she cites Peter Demetz's recollection of the teaching of literature, and she expresses apprehension about the spread of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches. One can argue with James about the urgency of language learning, without drawing the conclusion that a focus on literature alone is the core goal of the department. Indeed, I suspect that a pedagogy oriented toward bringing language students to a concentration on traditional literature would drive students away; many of them have other, quite legitimate interests, perhaps historical or political, or grounded in the other arts. It in no way diminishes a department of French or German to have students, who are working on acquiring language skills, learn about the history of those cultures, rather than just about their literary history. This is the cultural literacy—or cultural studies—that I mentioned earlier; of course, this is a different “cultural studies” from the often fashionable one to which James may well be right to object, especially because that dominant “cultural studies” is often quite blind to concreteness of linguistic difference.
It is a complex moment in intellectual life: administrative cost cutting and the corporate model of downsizing are seen, correctly, as threats to the future of language learning in higher education. At the same time, however, literary theory, despite all its putative radicalism, may be undermining our store as well: an odd coalition, indeed, from the “right” and from the “left.” Perhaps the same processes of internationalization and abstraction that operate both globally and in our professional lives will continue to make language learning an important offering in higher education. In the light of this opportunity, it becomes all the more important for us to hold on to this work, and not to let it slip out of our hands.
Russell A. Berman
Stanford University
MY INVITATION to respond to the James piece arrived several days before I was to leave for the 1997 ADFL Summer Seminar West in Colorado Springs. I had heard the James talk at ADFL Summer Seminar West in San Diego and had nodded in agreement with it and in relief. I looked forward to reading the hard copy when I returned from Colorado Springs. In my view, the profession was finally beginning to come out of denial. And coming out of denial is always the first sign of recovery.
San Diego 1996 had been my first ADFL seminar, and I had enjoyed it thoroughly. I thought I was going to enjoy Colorado Springs 1997. Indeed, one always sees old friends and colleagues, and discussions are usually lively and interesting. But on Saturday morning, during the coffee break, I went back to my room to call United Airlines to see if I could return to San Francisco early—I couldn't take any more.
Many of the talks (in parallel to what I had heard at the MLA convention in 1996, in Washington, DC) were marked by the same set of arguments—that deans and administrators are evil, that if they would simply get off our backs, the world would be at peace once again. After sitting through two and a half days of that sort of rhetoric in Washington, I returned home to write “Victim Narratives or Victimizing Narratives? Discussions of the Reinvention of Language Departments and Language Programs.” This piece was based on my paper for the 1996 MLA convention where, in James's words, I had been a “workshop leader” in a workshop in which, as James had observed at the annual convention in 1995, there was a dearth of Forum superstars. There was one, of course; the person who had put the forum and workshop groups together.
To interpret the James subtext, one comes to expect that two-pronged character at the annual convention. One does not expect it at an ADFL seminar, attended usually by workshop leaders. But here I was in Colorado Springs listening to yet another set of victim narratives. Perhaps the speakers were rehearsing for forum roles in Toronto.
I, of course, couldn't return to San Francisco early unless I chose to pay another $450. So the next question became, “Should I really go to my assigned discussion group or should I seek out a local museum?” My adult side took over, and I arrived dutifully at my discussion group. I was glad that I had. That group permitted me to vent a little and to try out the term “victim narrative” on my colleagues. Some nodded along in agreement. I continued that we had to start to pay attention to our beginning-language programs. Some nodded in agreement. There was a slight topic shift in the conversation, and a colleague entered the discussion with an argument to the effect that first- and second-year language teaching really is high school teaching. I could only respond that if that were true, and I was the dean of his institution, I would personally close the language program.
I was glad that I was there to hear my colleague's statement. It underlined for me again the thrust of the James argument. We are on the verge of intellectual bankruptcy. But in contrast to James—who implies that this bankruptcy has been fomented principally by the forum leaders—I believe there has been a real partnership between forum and workshop leaders in the demise. This partnership revolves around the golden calf of the “research agenda.” As James notes, the reward system based on the research agenda is generally used as an excuse for forum leaders not to care about language teaching and learning. What disturbs me about her article is that she fails to point out that many of those departmental occupants who work in language teaching and learning have failed to contribute to the intellectual mission and research agendas of their departments. In fact, as long as those who teach and care about language believe they are “teaching high school” and act accordingly (one wonders, for example, how many of those language teachers sitting in the James presentation on that Friday afternoon at Columbia regularly attend, participate in, and contribute to the activities sponsored by their colleagues in literature and culture), they will never be accepted as full-fledged members of a university language department. They shouldn't be. They, too, must contribute to the intellectual project of a language and literature department. Most of the time, they simply do not. They, too, use the smokescreen of the “research agenda” as their excuse: their colleagues will not accept their scholarship; therefore, they do not do any.
Universities are established in order to bring about the creation of new knowledge. New knowledge in language, culture, and literature departments cannot be created if students have no language tools; but providing language tools is only one dimension of a language, culture, and literature department. If those tools do not reflect an intellectual agenda and inspire the pursuit of an intellectual agenda, they should not be considered part of a university education.
James deserves our respect and gratitude. The James argument helps us to extend the loan on our store. My hope is that we heed the call before the loan comes due.
Elizabeth Bernhardt
Stanford University
Bernhardt, Elizabeth. “Victim Narratives or Victimizing Narratives? Discussions of the Reinvention of Language Departments and Language Programs.” ADFL Bulletin 29.1 (1997): 13–19. [Show Article]
AT THE invitation of Elizabeth Welles I join the discussion in and on the field of foreign language education. As a starting point, the remarks that follow respond to Dorothy James's thoughtful article. However, the wider frame of my reflection is the generally acknowledged crisis in foreign language enrollments, recently marked by a steep decline in the traditionally taught European language and literature sequences and the “unexpected” boom in Spanish, the latter language reconfigured as an American language.
Professor James's call to ensure the future of the profession, to pass on a legacy of employment to the next generation of literary critics, is a sentiment of the highest order and one with which no one could quarrel. However, both her analysis of how we got where we are and the corollary suggestions for solving the problem merit further inquiry. For example, it would help to know what exactly is meant by “the profession.” Is this a stable and homogeneous group of people whose identity hinges on a rationalized and naturalized set of practices? Or do we—employed or partially employed members of the Modern Language Association—constitute a multiple aggregate of professionals more or less organized in departments that respond to a nineteenth-century concept of the organization of knowledge and thus of “education”? Is the language-literature sequence that many seek to save not part of our nineteenth-century legacy of philology? Should we not ask to have a clearer sense of the set of pedagogical assumptions, internal principles of administration, cultural understandings, and national interests that together have maintained the language and literature connection now in crisis? Such unquestioned assumptions, defining our sense of the profession and even of our disciplines, have percolated down all the way to the SAT II—which, in Spanish at least, mainly tests knowledge concerning Peninsular writers up to the end of the First World War. And so I ask, when we prepare doctoral students, when we discuss curriculum for teacher education programs, are we in the profession aware of the articulations between high school preparation, college curricula, and the training of the next generation of teacher-scholars?
Seen from a wider societal perspective, the increase-decrease “crisis” in enrollments in foreign language education clearly intersects with realities that are weightier than the witticism and laughter at the MLA forums as reported by James. The crisis is more directly related to several well-known but not often acknowledged facts: (1) There is a widely recognized failure of foreign language education to turn out majors who achieve proficiency. Gail Guntermann shows, in “Prospects for Significant Teacher Education Reform,” the details of what is missing, what is misconceived, and discusses, without illusions, the uncertain possibility for reform. (2) The new global economic and cultural paradigm has refashioned the role of European culture in American universities. (3) The same shift has necessitated the acquisition of effective oral and written command of living languages from all quarters of the globe. (4) The postmodern shift in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies has consequently relocated literature on a more horizontal space of textualities. Among many other publications, this has been keenly discussed in Redrawing the Boundaries , edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. (5) The emergence of Spanish as a living American language, linked to the presence of the Latin American and Latino American communities in an increasingly multicultural United States and Canada, has produced a boom in Spanish enrollments. (6) And last but certainly not least, the technological revolution—which has shrunk time and space, pushed aside the print media, and redefined communications—has irreversibly transformed the ground on which foreign language education rests. Nothing has cut more sharply into the language-literature umbilical cord than the ongoing communications and media revolution.
These forces have traversed the profession while we have been minding the store but not looking out and beyond our customary, self-enforced assumptions. A whirlwind has swept away the fallen leaves of the legacy of the nineteenth century. The people at the forum and at the workshops have all been passive as well as active agents in the circulation of the whirlwind. Literature, the objective of the “language” major, has been irreversibly redefined, and such transformation has saved literary studies from becoming themselves part of the dry leaves of autumn. Literature has been moved to a less vertical value system, in which it keeps company with other cultural forms. It is no longer the only port of entry into other cultures, nor do other peoples and other cultures remain distant and inaccessible. The book, that wonderful, portable conveyor of individual subjectivities and cultures, is no longer merely supplemented by other media; it has often been superseded by the power of film, video, teleconferencing, and the immediacy of personal dialogue. Language education is not tied to the study of literature anymore, and if we want to pass a legacy on to the next generation, as I very much do, we must train doctoral students who can make a contribution in the present learning and teaching environment. The store metaphor calls for taking stock of old merchandise, for seeking new loans and vast recapitalization, in order to invest in new horizons.
In this regard, at the First International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in Zacatecas, Mexico, García Márquez spoke on the power of the word, on the God of words of the Maya, and on his conviction that images are not replacing words, nor can they ever eradicate the word's power to transform and create. However, the author of Chronicle of a Death Foretold also spoke of the deadening power of tradition and ideologies of language purity, as institutionalized in the regulatory operation of grammars and dictionaries. The intelligence of language, language in oral or written usage, he said, is bursting at the seams of ill-conceived notions of classic usage and classic authors. García Márquez scandalized his learned audience of watchdog grammarians and editors of dictionaries issued by the various academies de la lengua when he suggested that he sees an urgent need to “simplify our [Spanish] grammar before it simplifies us.” He went on to remind the world of the living American situatedness of Spanish: “Let us humanize its rules, and accept from our indigenous languages [Nahuatl, Guarani, Quechua, Bororo]—to which we owe so much already—the great, enriching lessons they can teach us.” García Márquez's remarks are pertinent here because his calls for aggiornamento, with his plea to the God of words, are made in an effort to save literature from those who fashion themselves as its guardians but who, in regulating grammars, canon, and modes of reception, have in fact diminished its readability.
Very little in this is new. Spelling reform, changes in the conventions of language usage, hierarchies of languages' value, their purity, and the appropriate rate of transformation have always attracted debate. In the case of foreign language teaching in the United States, foundations, corporations, several educational institutions, and the federal government have already been investing in the transformation of language education and literacy. The New Jersey Project has been working for several years in a thoughtful transformation of the curriculum. It reports in its Newsletter (Fall, 1997) that the Advanced Placement exam in English Language and Composition given by the College Entrance Examination Board has responded to curriculum transformation calls and now includes excerpts from the works of Frederick Douglass, George Orwell and Meena Alexander. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has led the way in fostering the training of a new professoriat. The NEH project Language across the Curriculum made a very promising start. In the specific case of Spanish and its bulging enrollments, the call for deep transformation of the curriculum, made by Cristina González in “The Future of Spanish in Academia,” is on the minds and lips of many people who see the reality not only of the increased enrollments and the needs of the student population but also the impact of the global change that has occurred. Unfortunately there is not only inertia but even protracted resistance in Spanish departments, which, in some cases, would like to convince their administrators of the need to appoint one professor for each century of Peninsular textual production. Cristina González is correct when she underlines the importance of a shift in orientation, in the upper-level curriculum, from a Eurocentric concentration in most Spanish departments to a curriculum that recognizes the ties of part of the student population to the Latin and Latino American communities and the well-informed desire of the rest of the students enrolled in Spanish courses to learn about the American Spanish-speaking cultures.
The same problem of optics detracts from the usefulness of language textbooks and laboratory materials. García Márquez would have a field day with the content of some of the videos as exercises that “simplify us.” In a recent workshop I was treated to the sarcastic laughter of Latin American and Latino American teachers and students as they discussed the feelings of alienation provoked by the portrayal of a Eurocentric, pan-Hispanic culture in the much acclaimed video Destinos . These residents of North and South American megalopolises, whose roots are often one generation away from the rural areas of Latin America, felt at odds with almost every depiction of cultural patterns in the series. For instance, they pointed out that not every Latin and Latino American is Catholic. Where are the Evangelicals, the Jews, the voodoo brotherhoods, the agnostics, and the worshipers of the old Indian gods, they asked? Administrators will be more easily persuaded of the shared benefit of full-time appointments when department heads can demonstrate that the courses they teach provide students with a high literacy that can be carried into other fields of learning and that is attuned to the communities of the here and now.
The good news is that many people in education already have an intelligent analysis of the situation and have taken important steps to bring about reform. However, the pace of transformation is uneven, painfully slow, and, for many individuals, risky. There has yet to be developed a consensus, in places like the MLA, regarding the value placed on, and the professional recognition awarded to, those individuals working for positive change. Unless a wide consensus for reform receives the support of large institutions and even foundations, many young people may continue to be wasted in a professional market in which their work is sorely needed but in which—as a function of its system of rewards—work on pedagogy, curriculum, and learning is accorded little visibility. The MLA articulation project provides a good start for rethinking language and culture education and establishing a network for coordinated reform. It will, one hopes, lead to an expansion of full-time appointments across the institutions of higher learning.
On the whole, the call to save the profession as a legacy for the next generation of teacher-scholars is indeed a matter of urgency. However, I do not believe that the incentives or demands to carry on with research and publication at the expense of teaching language in the language and literature departments is the root cause of the problem. The publish-or-perish structure, together with the star system, has, of course, problems of its own, but that is a subject for another conversation. If people who have forged an identity teaching literature spent less time doing research and taught language all the way up in the curriculum, things would not change much. The crisis is tied to global, historical, and demographic changes that the blind linkage of language learning to an exclusive literature curriculum has only aggravated.
A significant decoupling of language learning from literature would result in the return of student populations to upper-level courses—to a newly designed upper-level curriculum for majors and nonmajors alike. It would make it possible for all students enrolled to achieve higher levels of proficiency. Students would choose from a variety of knowledges offered in the upper-division tracks—business, medicine, politics, environment, health, literature, music. Members of a new or retrained professoriat, proficient in the target language and the target culture of medicine, music, or health care, would teach the course without feeling that they were sacrificing either their training or their intellectual interest in order to save the “department.” The professors' interest would then be in sync with the students'. Literature professors would offer courses to students interested in literature and cultural studies. They might even regularly teach courses in translation for those who are interested in German, French, or Chinese literature but cannot take the time to learn the languages in order to study the literature.
Another piece of good news is that there are, out in the field, several sound proposals for significant reform. These range from the project by David Maxwell, of the Language Research Center, for “freestanding language programs,” to Gail Guntermann's and Michael Wallace's proposals for training foreign language teachers, to John Rassias's theater method. Given the size of the student population in the United States and the variety of educational institutions, it is to be expected that a diverse set of programs will be in place at the same time. New instruments for accreditation will play a crucial role. For little will have been gained if rigorous standards for proficiency are not accepted and implemented as part of each and all instructional steps. In order for bachelor's, master's, and especially doctoral degrees to be awarded, candidates must be required to pass a proficiency test administered by an independent national testing service. Only then will departments really pay attention to the learning the students do with either full-time or part-time instructors, and only then will the administrator's attention be focused on the quality and growth of appointments made to the language and culture teaching professoriat.
Sara Castro-Klarén
Johns Hopkins University
García Márquez, Gabriel. “Words Are in a Hurry. Get Out of the Way.” New York Times. 3 Aug. 1997, sec. 4: 13.
González, Cristina. “The Future of Spanish in Academia.” ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 37–39. [Show Article]
Greenblatt, Stephen, and Giles Gunn, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies . New York: MLA, 1992.
Guntermann, Gail. “Prospects for Significant Teacher Education Reform.” ADFL Bulletin 28.3 (1997): 26–31. [Show Article]
Wallace, Michael J. Training Foreign Language Teachers: A Reflective Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
DOROTHY JAMES is not only right to sound the alarm concerning the crisis in leadership in the field of foreign language and literature; the issues she raises should be taken up by every language and literature department in the country. Who indeed is minding the store, when a trend of department and program reductions and eliminations provides direct evidence that the store needs minding? Whether or not one agrees with James in terms of a solution, still the issues need to be addressed if we want some measure of control over our own future—if we want to ensure that future generations of language and literature scholars have secure places in academe and that future generations of undergraduates continue to be exposed to the subjects we teach.
The kind of change James seeks faces significant obstacles. Perhaps most daunting, it would require that large numbers of scholars and teachers sacrifice familiar, traditional, and high-status behaviors that have until now yielded direct rewards, to devote proportionally more time to behavior that is generally acknowledged to be lower in status, with an indirect reward. Moreover, not all faculty members would agree with James that the curricular modifications she suggests are necessarily positive; certainly there will be those who see moving away from what is currently thought to be tradition as a lowering of standards. Never mind that tradition and standards are two separate issues; beleaguered faculty members can lose perspective and, in the face of declining student interest, hold even tighter to familiar patterns for the few students who remain.
Even for those who agree with James, action would require forefronting a common good that is not universally acknowledged, risking that it will have a detrimental effect on personal success, and coping with the criticism of opponents. Until academics are faced with events that directly link their individual success to this kind of shift in perspective, there is little incentive to change behavior significantly. Even when change takes place, participants may outwardly express reluctance, apologetically explaining that they are “forced” into curricular change by their administration, student demographics, or other factors, rather than see such change as a positive form of evolution.
Proponents of the kind of change advocated by James must combat an academic socialization process that assigns degrees of status (and therefore priorities) to different aspects of the professional academic career. When the graduate students at Columbia cited by James noted the absence of the literature professors at their workshop, they may indeed have worried that “they might never themselves become literature professors, able on Friday afternoons to work in their libraries with a clear conscience while someone else attended workshops on language teaching,” but they also received yet another confirmation that “success” in their field gives release from the obligation of worrying about such matters as were being discussed at that workshop. It is not that these absent literature professors necessarily do not value what is going on at such workshops. Rather, it is a question of priority; their time and energies are better spent in other ways, there are many demands on their time, and they have, in a sense, earned the right to be absent. It is held by many scholars that superior talents are best used for research and writing (and the training of graduate students). Teaching may be important, but the teaching of large numbers of undergraduates who will never be specialists in the field is less important than doing other things. In such a view, excessive time spent on teaching is time lost to research, and since research is more important than teaching, the choice is clear. That teaching is simply not as prestigious as scholarship is no news—regardless of the importance of teaching at all but a relatively small number of institutions, the importance of teaching to all students in all institutions, and the value placed on teaching over research in higher education by the public at large. Within academe, however, the view articulated by Daniel Bell is unfortunately all too common:
Teaching is a craft, and those who practice it are superior schoolmasters. There have sometimes been very great teachers who are able to teach what others have written by explicating what they have done.
At a major university, which is devoted to scholarship and research, one wants individuals who are creative. There is a problem in how one measures creativity, for it does not always mean writing it down. However, I do not think that one ought to overly romanticize teaching if one is thinking of a major university which is involved in testing, challenging, and creating knowledge in the best sense of the term.
Teaching is an applied art and to that extent it is secondary, at least for the purposes of some universities.
(Reisman, Bell, Vendler, and Gould 15–16)
Our students are socialized to this view, in message after message, in subtle and not so subtle ways: when institutions regard graduate student teaching first as financial aid and only second as essential professional preparation, when graduate advisors treat graduate student teaching as something that can be done essentially on the side, when junior faculty members are told that tenure depends on publication and that they shouldn't spend too much time on their teaching, when tenure decisions in fact give little weight to teaching performance, when senior faculty members argue for the “professionalization?” of language teaching by hiring low-paid, non-tenure-track staff, and so on. In the face of all these messages, lip service paid to teaching has the effect of telling aspiring young professors precisely where not to devote their energies. (Bell continues, “I think there is a very honorable craft of teaching….” 16) What ambitious young graduate student should prefer a “craft” or an “applied art,” or to be a “superior school-master,” over being a creative individual “involved in testing, challenging, and creating knowledge in the best sense of the term”? By the time these students become assistant professors, it is already too late to teach old dogs new tricks, and they are likely to aspire to the same criteria of success that they have been conditioned to respect.
A second important obstacle that is too rarely acknowledged is the sheer difficulty of good teaching and the amount of time and energy required. At introductory levels or with students who are less knowledgeable, the long hours and repetition may feel particularly burdensome. What excites most teachers is newness and discovery, the enrichment of their own knowledge and research by interaction with their advanced, knowledgeable students. Bell explains, “I teach what I am curious about. I teach because it is a way of engaging my curiosity and being one step ahead of my students…. It is after I have taught something and satisfied my curiosity that I may decide to write about it” (13). Few successful teacher-scholars willingly choose a program of lower- or intermediate-level teaching over advanced courses and knowledgeable students. Without the excitement of discovery (or when it is encountered only rarely), lower-level teaching is much more like work; and the greater proportion of “performance” and various forms of practice, the more routine such teaching is likely to feel.
Therefore, a practical obstacle to the kind of integrated curriculum that James proposes is the general unattractiveness (for many faculty members) of incorporating more language learning (performance and practice activities) into advanced level courses. Perhaps for most faculty members this idea is not appealing, and not only in the foreign language and literature field. In other fields, development of the writing skill forms a useful parallel; it is not uncommon for faculty members to believe that students in their courses should already know how to write or if they don't, they should take courses in writing. Faculty members may at the same time feel poorly equipped to teach writing as a skill, and regard the reading and correcting of large numbers of student papers as tedious work. When instructors are faced with many other demands on their time and where course assistants are available, it is natural that the reading and correcting of papers should be passed to course assistants. At one major research institution, a study of writing revealed that while faculty members strongly supported the importance of student writing, over ninety percent of undergraduate course work was being read or supervised by graduate student teaching assistants (Sommers). This is not to say that these teaching assistants were not in many cases doing an excellent job—only that this work, involving performance and practice, was work that faculty members chose not to perform.
In the face of such obstacles, James is unquestionably right that the field needs “stars” to return to leadership that can support the preservation of endangered programs and foster the development of curricula that encourage more students to study language and literature, the sustenance of the field. Unfortunately, the very people who could do the most good are too often in relatively secure departments and programs, insulated by distance from experiencing the erosion of their field in threateningly concrete terms. Focused on producing a few great students rather than on democratically educating the masses, they may even persuade themselves that there is a form of natural selection at work—some programs may be lost, but the strong ones will survive. The nature of scholarly work in the humanities only promotes isolation—we are accustomed to working alone, accomplishing our research by long hours in the library and in our studies, sharing bits and pieces at conferences, but not seeing ourselves as part of the collaborative process that is more characteristic of the sciences. In fact, it is often to our advantage to be closemouthed, since we may well be rewarded for our innovation, creativity— difference from what others have done. In the humanities, praise comes from creating the new , not from collaborating on building on previous work.
I have reviewed some of the forces hindering reform, not to be pessimistic but to identify factors that need to be considered and countered if reintegration of our field is to be achieved. In countering these factors, we need more than emotionally charged objections—rather, acknowledgment and reasoned discussion that points to the consequences of continuing along the path on which we now find ourselves, versus exploring the benefit of coexisting alternatives. It is unlikely that anyone opposes the strength of the field—merely that there is difference of opinion as to how it should be achieved or maintained. We should all participate in strengthening in every way possible the various language and literature fields, and the humanities in general. Even if our stars are slow to react, there are still steps that can be taken by virtually anyone.
Be an advocate for your field with your students. (1) Work to ensure that all your students, regardless of the level of performance, leave your courses with a positive view of your subject. Realize that you are contributing to the formation of attitudes toward language and literature that students may carry with them for a lifetime and that may in a ripple effect influence others. As a rather dramatic example, the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning, which has done enormous good in the field of foreign language teaching, had its seed in the enthusiasm of a single language student for her studies, and the coincidence that her father was both influenced by her enthusiasm and in a position to do something about it. In a more mundane example, thirty years after having taken university extension courses in Russian literature and modern sculpture, a student wrote a thank-you note to the institution, saying, “My life has been richer the last thirty years because of what I learned then” (Adams 2). Let your students see your enthusiasm, your excitement in what you do. Don't think that your passion should be kept modestly under wraps; let students see that you love your work; tell them why it is exciting, and hope that they will tell others. (3) Tell students why the study of foreign language and literature is important (for everyone, not just for specialists), and give specific reasons. Don't assume that just because students are enrolled in your courses, they already know. Then make certain that your courses embody the reasons that you have identified. (4) Talk about the integration of your courses with other courses in your department and in your institution. Encourage students to take related courses by letting them know something of their content, connection, and fundamental interest.
Work within your department or program. (1) Do you know what is taught in other courses in your department or program? If you teach lower-level language courses, do you know what is taught in higher-level courses or in literature and culture courses? If you teach higher-level courses, are there ways you could build on the strengths of lower-level courses? Too often, lower- and higher-level courses work at cross-purposes—e.g., practical oral proficiency versus critical reading and writing. Talk to your colleagues and learn more about what they do. Approach change first in terms of modifying aspects of your own courses (rather than demanding change in colleagues' courses). You may well start a dialogue that will eventually lead to better integration. (2) Try to put the question of curriculum on your departmental agenda. If your department is receptive, identify your priorities and see where those decisions lead (Chaput). If your department is not ready to sit down to create an integrated curriculum, consider what you can do alone or with like-minded colleagues to promote partial kinds of integration. (3) If only some members of your department are receptive to a better-integrated curriculum, consider a collaborative effort you might undertake with one or more of them that might in turn suggest further collaboration. (4) Count (by course lists or other means) the number of majors and nonmajors in various courses. Try to understand patterns and how they might be used to indicate possible adjustments in course content. (5) Support faculty positions for individuals who will primarily teach language and direct language programs. Recognize the importance of faculty rank to the strength of your department within your institution and the field in general. (6) If you have graduate students, place their teaching in a context of professional preparation. Work to see that graduate student TAs have reasonable teaching and accompanying course loads, and for the TAs you supervise let faculty colleagues know of their contribution to your courses. (7) Never demean lower-level language courses as “skills,” “service courses,” or “just language.” Such designations are rooted in status distinctions that only divide and weaken the field. Negative terminology does no good, while avoiding negative terminology not only does no harm, it brings benefit. Students value well-taught courses that contribute significantly to their education and personal growth; respecting that perspective can strengthen programs.
Be an advocate for a better-integrated curriculum with graduate students, faculty members, and administration. (1) At appropriate opportunities, articulate assumptions about the balance of research and teaching and the importance of considering the vitality and future of your field. (2) Articulate for colleagues in other fields the intellectual importance of language and cultural studies for undergraduate students. Do not assume that colleagues or administrators accept the same definitions of your field as you do. (3) Talk about the curriculum from the perspective of the undergraduate major and nonmajor. Many graduate students and new faculty members accept the curriculum as given; they are unaccustomed to thinking of it as something within their power to create or change. (4) Recognize the extent to which it is common for teaching to be unrelated or only indirectly related to research. Even the most fortunate faculty members typically teach only one course in their research area, and other courses for the benefit of the department or institution. The perception of teaching as the domain of specialists is a dangerous misconception that, as James correctly notes, can lead to the hiring of cheap labor for large lower-level language courses and the subsequent determination that higher-level courses are too expensive or unnecessary. (5) As in your department, support faculty positions for individuals who will primarily teach language and direct language programs. Recognize the importance of faculty rank to the strength of your department within your institution. (6) Do not denigrate the activity of teaching. If you find yourself critical of certain teaching practices, identify and criticize the practices in a context that respects and values teaching as part of the academic career. Recognize that conditions are different from institution to institution, and that good teaching must take the needs and interests of the student body into account. Dividing the field with status distinctions only weakens it.
Do what you can to work within professional organizations. This may be a cliché, but it is no less true. I will not rehearse the familiar ways in which such organizations can contribute, except to say that any change requires publicity, and professional organizations have many means of publicizing and supporting ideas. Realize that many ideas take time to come to any kind of fruition.
Be an advocate for your field with the public. (1) Talk to anyone and everyone about the importance of studying foreign languages and literatures. Avoid vague generalities; instead, provide intriguing examples. Think of chance conversations as opportunities to influence public opinion, even if on a small scale. (2) Counter expressions of failure (e.g., “I took French, but I was just terrible at it”) with explanation. Not all approaches to language learning over the years have been successful. Generations of learners were subjected to approaches that did not work for them. Times have changed, and language can be taught now in more successful and interesting ways. (3) Counter expressions of unrealistic expectations (“I studied Spanish for four years and still can't order a meal in a restaurant“) with explanation: “You shouldn't expect to. Social rituals like ordering a meal require specific formulas and vocabulary. They are often difficult to learn and are among the first things to be forgotten.” Compare language retention to that in math, chemistry, history. How much detail do most adults retain from courses in these areas? Talk about what students should learn and retain from foreign language courses. Consider your own priorities, whether in terms of language structure, sociolinguistic behaviors, or other cultural information. Do your courses effectively teach the material that you want students to retain?
To support the kind of integrated curriculum promoted by James should not be an either-or proposition but rather an argument for variety and flexibility. James asks the profession to take a look at itself and where its behavior is leading, then to act on that knowledge to secure a desirable future. The more we allow division, inattention, and neglect to “lead” our profession, the less there will be to lead. Yes, we need a reunification in leadership and in the curriculum, but it is the job of all of us to work for those goals.
Patricia R. Chaput
Harvard University
Adams, John F. “On Sending Thank-You Notes and Learning about the World.” Harvard University Extension School Alumni Bulletin 30.1 (1996): 2.
Chaput, Patricia R. “Difficult Choices: Planning and Prioritizing in a Language Program.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 29–34. [Show Article]
Reisman, David, Daniel Bell, Helen Vendler, and Stephen Jay Gould. “Balancing Teaching and Writing.” On Teaching and Learning: Journal of the Harvard-Danforth Center 2 (1987): 10–16.
Sommers, Nancy. “A Study of Undergraduate Writing at Harvard.” Harvard Univ., 1994.
I INTEND in no way to engage in a polemic with Dorothy James's attempt to attract attention to the moment of crisis those of us in the foreign languages are currently facing. Infighting is something we can ill afford at present. We may not all agree about exactly which problems are most urgent or about what kind of action must be taken, but we need both to work together and to be aggressive in attempts at disciplinary innovation. We need to do a lot of hard thinking about just what it is that we want to accomplish in our teaching; we need to imagine, as James suggests, new ways of organizing our pedagogical practice; we need to share ideas and information on what does and does not work in our respective institutions.
Foreign language departments as we know them today are essentially the products of the last fin de siècle—American attempts at imitating European creations. It is high time that we restructure our departments to bring them in line with the realities of the university in the United States, as well as those of the twentieth century's radically different fin de siècle.
No contributor to these pages will be able to speak to the situations faced by all foreign language professionals today. My own competence is defined by the field of French studies and by the fact that I have always taught in PhD-granting institutions. From this perspective, I feel obliged to call attention to an area of particular concern: recently, applications for graduate study in French have declined sharply at many institutions, to the point that, if this downturn continues, we will soon find ourselves faced with a dire shortage of qualified candidates, candidates for graduate study, candidates for future jobs. No field, even one in which entry-level positions are at a premium, can continue to renew itself, when the pool of new talent shrinks beyond a critical point.
The question of why students seem to be turning away from French—even as they continue to pursue studies in such fields as English and comparative literature, in which job possibilities are clearly even less bright than in French—this question cannot be laid to rest with any single answer. One response I would offer rejoins, as does my personal program for change, the ideas put forth by James in a crucial area, that of pedagogical innovation. I have in mind here a particular type of pedagogical innovation, one that would help those of us in French to become more responsive to the changing needs and tastes of our undergraduates and, at the same time, prepare our graduate students for the professional realities they are likely to face.
In recent years, English departments in PhD-granting institutions have been increasingly innovative in using some of the multisectional courses (in which their graduate students serve as TAs) as structures that allow the professors directing them to discuss with their graduate students ways of integrating the teaching of writing skills and the teaching of literature and to put new ideas into practice. In contrast, French departments in general have failed to live up to their responsibility to train their graduate students as future teachers.
We in French have given precious little thought to what should be an essential part of the education of our doctoral candidates, the pedagogy of literature. One particularly bizarre aspect of the language and literature split addressed by James is that, while we have for some years taken it for granted that our graduate students should receive training in language pedagogy, we all too seldom think of giving them any significant training in literature pedagogy. In a period in which the teaching of foreign literatures in the languages in which they were written seems an increasingly endangered activity, it is surely becoming all the more crucial that we create a forum in which literature pedagogy can be taken seriously. We need to confront, along with our graduate students, the realities they will face from the beginning of their careers, to try to imagine with them ways in which foreign literatures can continue to remain central to university curricula. It can, of course, be objected that French departments rarely have any multisectional courses of the kind that can become a training ground for English departments. However, the time has come to begin developing just such courses.
Currently, those of us in French are in desperate need of curricular innovation in the area situated between advanced language courses and upper-level literature courses. Almost the only course we have ever developed in this area is the introduction to literature course that exists in one form or another at almost every institution and that is often multisectional. All of us who teach this course know that, in recent years, it has come more and more to serve a dual purpose: we continue to teach students about grammar, composition, and conversation, as though this were an advanced language course, even as we provide some basic initiation into the skills students will need if they continue on to our advanced literature classes.
The problem, of course, is that increasingly students have been choosing not to go on to upper-level literature courses. We may be able to overhaul the upper-level courses creatively one day. In the meantime, we need to find some way of encouraging students to go beyond language courses to courses in which literature plays at least a significant role. We can develop other middle-range courses that deal in various ways with our undergraduates' need for additional training after the two years of traditional language instruction are over, as well as with their desire to use their French in classes other than the advanced literature courses that have been, for too long, the only outlet for them beyond the lone introductory course.
We should develop these mid-range courses specifically with our graduate students in mind. We could create multisectional courses, organized by a professor but with sections staffed by advanced graduate students. These students could be involved in every phase of the course‘s planning. They are, after all, closer both to the interests of our undergraduates and, since most language courses at PhD-granting institutions are staffed largely or even exclusively by graduate students, to the problems of language instruction. The professor would teach a section of the course, which graduate students would attend. All those teaching the course would meet weekly to discuss literature pedagogy in particular, but also such questions as when and how points of grammar can be brought into the discussion of a literary text, or how to help undergraduates develop basic writing skills in French at the same time that they attempt to write about literature in French for the first time.
If French departments begin to take issues of pedagogical responsibility and pedagogical creativity seriously, more of the best potential graduate students might become convinced that it is still worth taking a chance on a career in French.
Joan DeJean
University of Pennsylvania
DURING the last dozen or so years, Dorothy James and I have spent many hours, on a variety of occasions, discussing the state of the profession, complete with historical reference (since each of us has spent more than 30 years participating in it), analysis of current affairs, and dreams, wishes, and prophecies for the future. We have ruminated over events, both those that we saw as episodic and others that we viewed as trends. We have speculated about probable outcomes of differing strategies for confronting problematic situations in institutions that we were mentoring, as well as in out own. And we have envisioned possibilities of extended, articulated sequences of language acquisition that would provide the background for students who choose to pursue literary studies. Because of our shared stories and speculations, I was not at all surprised by James's comments at the ADFL Seminar West, nor by her statements in the Spring 1997 ADFL Bulletin on the duality of leadership in the profession. Certainly James has earned the right to voice her concern about the profession that she serves faithfully and well. Nevertheless, I am somewhat reticent to make public my own concerns, fearing that my belief in our mission and my dedication to our collective efforts in the education of Americans may be questioned as a result of my attempt to articulate my doubts about our current situation in language departments. However, just as I have frequently encouraged James to speak her mind, I shall respond to her comments with the same candor.
In her article in the Bulletin , James provocatively asks, “Who's minding the store?” Although her term “the store” permits an effective question, it oversimplifies the organization of the discipline of languages and literatures. Perhaps we should view this endeavor more as a conglomerate of related businesses, with many individual store locations throughout the marketplace. But, for simplicity, let's use “the store” to identify this educational agent.
James points out our two decidedly different types of leadership in the language and literature enterprise: “the forum leaders on the public stage, the stars, the speakers who draw the big MLA crowds, the top publishing scholars” and the others, “the workshop leaders, the people who chair departments, who deal with the day-to-day business of staffing courses, of working with faculty members and administrators” (5).
To my mind, these leaders head separate organizational branches within our educational structure. On the one hand, we have the conglomerate of stores, the departments of languages and literatures at every level of instruction in schools and colleges throughout the country. This is the entity that develops curricula, provides instruction, evaluates student outcomes, reviews educational materials, experiments with teaching and learning strategies, writes textbooks, participates in community activities, judges language fairs, proctors AP exams, creates laboratory and Internet learning activities, serves on committees. The leaders of this branch of the language corporation need to be and tend to be energetic, creative, industrious individuals working in collaboration with one another for the good of the enterprise. While this teaching branch is, in fact, a fundamental part of the academic empire, it is, at the present time, the undervalued, undersupported, underfinanced entity in our corporate structure.
On the other hand, we have the literary research and publication branch of the language and literature corporation, the entity from which our traditional leadership has come and the group that produces our stars. These scholarly leaders at prestigious universities have dedicated themselves to a life of literary study, often solitary, sometimes with more interest in the battles of literary theory than in the academic struggles of the students in their few classes. It is to the members of this branch of our structure that the company grants respect and acclaim. These are the leaders who receive the media attention, the financial rewards, and the annual bonuses in the forms of grants, endowed chairs, and professional awards.
The instructional branch must concern itself with many of the aspects of operating an effective store. It must compete in the marketplace for clients, develop marketing and advertising strategies, make potential customers aware of the value and benefits of its product, keep its product up-to-date, optimally rotate its product to maximize sales, maintain a well-informed and service-oriented staff, respond to customer desires and complaints, and be managed for fiscal stability. We can easily translate these functions into their academic equivalents: recruitment of students, the scheduling and staffing of course offerings, curriculum development and evaluation, professional faculty and staff development, student advisement and mentoring, and budgeting.
While the instructional branch of the enterprise may function more or less like a store (or group of related stores), the literary research division seems to have more characteristics of a pyramid sales organization.
In a pyramid sales scheme, there are few positions at the top of the pyramid, generally occupied by early investors. These are profitable positions, producing large salaries. They provide opportunities for their holders to earn more and more with less and less personal productivity, since the occupants are rewarded for the productivity of those in the lower ranks of the organization. Individuals in these positions often make appearances before the general membership, giving testimonials to the greatness of the company and instructions on how one can reap major benefits. The similarities of these positions to those of our literary stars are striking. Certainly we have limited numbers of possible stars in our profession. The scholars at the top of our professional pyramid generally earn the best salaries and are provided with the best benefits. In our enterprise, one of the coveted awards is a further reduction in teaching load, an opportunity for less personal productivity in our teaching and learning business. Decreased personal classroom productivity by the stars is most often compensated by the university's increased use of low-paid, part-time instructors and teaching assistants in the large, lower-division sections. As in the business pyramid, our stars make frequent appearances at conferences, sharing their expertise and informing the membership of ways to grow into stardom.
In order to sustain the riches of the elite in a pyramid sales scheme, the company must maintain the level of membership, keep current members regularly buying the organization's products, and constantly attract new recruits. This characteristic is also evident in our academic enterprise. In order to continue the prestige of a scholar (and the university's willingness to enhance his or her rewards), the discipline must maintain sufficient enrollment in its courses, by attracting and retaining students in the department.
The momentum in a pyramid sales scheme cannot be sustained indefinitely. Ultimately, the organization collapses, unable to recruit enough new members willing to buy the company's expensive product and to work long hours at minimal pay to sustain the stars at the top. Similarly, in languages and literatures, we are experiencing both a decline in the number of students who want to continue their study beyond novice or intermediate language levels and an increase in the discontent of underpaid and underappreciated teachers at the lower levels of the academic organization.
Obviously, the research and publication branch of the language and literature enterprise is experiencing serious difficulties. The number of candidates for these positions is astounding and increasing, while the actual number of positions that will be filled is declining. Stories of personal tragedy abound as thousands of scholars compete for the dozens of available jobs. Promising academicians are forced to teach classes in multiple institutions at shameful wages in order to participate in the profession. The other branch, the instructional part of the enterprise, is also in trouble. In spite of the rhetoric about globalization throughout this country, with the obvious need for added language skills among the populace, fewer Americans are choosing to study foreign languages (with the notable exception of Spanish) in the traditional academic setting. The resulting declines in enrollments are threatening the replacement of retiring faculty members in many institutions and even the existence of some programs.
However, not all the store locations are suffering. There are good stores in existence, profitable, full of customers and bustling with energy and activity. These are the centers that respond to their own market research: the merchandise is current and of high quality, regularly and systematically rotated, well displayed and inviting to potential clients, well marketed and advertised. The people minding the store are customer-oriented, willing to answer questions, knowledgeable about the products and the location of inventory, up-to-date on schedules for delivery and restocking, and alert to early signs of any difficulty. In our best locations, departments also respond to their market research: they offer series of courses to students with variable personal goals for language acquisition, courses scheduled for student convenience and availability and rotated carefully for reasonable access. Various modes of presentation and practice are routinely available, to meet different learning styles and needs of students. Course content and instructional materials are kept up-to-date and thus interesting both to faculty members and to students. Course offerings are well publicized far enough in advance for students to do long-term planning of their schedules. The faculty members in these locations are enthusiastic and energetic, consistently improving their professional expertise in theory, content, and delivery. They respond to the needs of their students in terms of course content, course delivery, learning styles, time management, and affective issues. The attitude of these faculty members is welcoming and encouraging. Since they find joy in their work, their students, happy with their own efforts, complete courses and return for additional ones. Furthermore, in these best locations, there is no absentee supervisor; the leaders of these departments are involved in the day-to-day operation of the enterprise, carefully examining trends and issues, responding to requests and suggestions of faculty members and students in a timely manner. In addition, they maintain close working relationships with the other language-teaching institutions in the educational sequence.
Of course, isolated successes in individual storefronts are insufficient to ensure the long-term continuation of the pyramid sales organization in its current form. Some kind of change will be required of us, either through our own recognition of a need for change or by the dictates of dissatisfied governing boards, state legislatures, and members of the general population. Here we face the problem of identifying and empowering the appropriate leadership to guide us through a self-study and a potential restructuring of our organization. Perhaps it is time for us to recognize, empower, and honor a variety of potential leaders currently working in diverse programs at different kinds of institutions. Unquestionably, there is sufficient thought and effort to be expended to allow the participation of many people.
Diverse leadership from throughout the discipline could direct us as we examine our disciplinary structure, redefine our goals, study our priorities, reflect on our values, evaluate our reward system, and find our balance again. Perhaps we need a candid reexamination of how we can meet the requirements for teaching languages and literatures in our society. Perhaps an opening of lines of communication between and among the various levels of language and literature instruction throughout the system would promote an enhanced understanding of and respect for those working in all the components of our system.
However we decide to approach the situation logistically, I would recommend that we mind our store thoughtfully, that we listen to our potential market and determine how we can offer our clientele a logical series of related courses in careful sequences over a sufficient period of time to permit language acquisition and literary study in a systematic manner.
Jane Harper
Tarrant County Junior College,
Northeast Campus, TX
IN HER essay “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership,” Dorothy James stresses the need “for a genuine coordination over a period of years of language and literature teaching within the humanistic framework of a liberal arts curriculum and rooted in a clear awareness of undergraduate students' needs, their needs to be seriously educated, to reach a high level of literacy, and ultimately to make their way in a tough real world” (7). She points here to three major problems: an imperfect understanding of the linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and professional needs of students; an inadequate integration of language, literature, and culture within foreign language curricula; and an insufficient articulation of foreign language curricula with both preprofessional curricula and the overall undergraduate liberal arts program.
Several years ago I suggested a model for integrating language, literature, and cultural study within foreign language programs from the beginning level to the advanced seminar. This model relied on three guiding principles that are, I think, highly relevant to the issues that James raises: (1) the need for specific goals, clearly defined in terms of functional levels, for all skills, knowledge, and attitudinal development; (2) the value of content organization that encourages students to relate new material to what they have learned elsewhere, particularly in other courses (whether in the department of foreign languages and literature or in other disciplines) and from their experiences in foreign settings or with exchange students and faculty members; (3) the benefit to be derived from a structure that allows students with different but compatible academic, professional, and cultural requirements to exit an instructional program at different points, to reenter after study or internship abroad, and to continue beyond the undergraduate curriculum (Henning 53).
I would like to look again at these principles, focusing this time on how programs of modern and classical languages and literatures might be more thoroughly integrated into the overall academic culture, thereby beginning to overcome the marginalization and even isolation from which they often suffer. The difficulty is to do this without compromising fatally the discipline's distinct character.
“The MLA Survey of Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements, 1994–95” indicates that, at that time, one-fifth of all four-year colleges had foreign language entrance requirements. Two-thirds had degree requirements and a further 17% had foreign language courses among their distribution requirements (Brod and Huber 35, 37). Comparing, moreover, the results of the 1987–88 and 1994–95 surveys reveals that entrance and degree requirements were rarely dropped and were frequently added. The majority of institutions that modified their requirements during this seven-year period did so in order to strengthen them (38).
What do these institutions expect that their students will gain through foreign language study? The reasons most widely acknowledged do, I believe, reflect the general feeling on colleges campuses. Foreign language professionals think that students should study a language for at least two years. Yet their institutions required only 1.3 years, “about sixty percent less than the amount deemed necessary for students to benefit from the values” (Frantz 45, 46). One and a third years is less than three semesters and does not take students very far into the curriculum. It does not allow them to develop much proficiency. It certainly does not bring them to a point where they can begin using the foreign language to acquire knowledge on their own and to make more rapid progress either from direct interpersonal contact or from texts in the broad sense. Even my intermediate French students realized as much themselves.
Faculty members in other disciplines, particularly area and professional studies, need to give more thought to the precise foreign language skills and cultural knowledge that would truly benefit their undergraduate majors. Setting realistic goals is an indispensable step. Students and their advisors need to be more aware both of the fact that there are various specific levels of proficiency and of the time and effort actually necessary to attain them. Acquiring a given level of proficiency is, I have found, generally more difficult and time-consuming than monolingual students and faculty members are prepared at first to believe, and they do not want it to be so (Valdés 6). It is quite unrealistic to assume that after a mere 1.3 years of language study, students will be able to conduct a business meeting, negotiate a contract, or handle an irate customer.
As James points out both here and elsewhere, many foreign language faculty members are equally at fault (“Teaching”). Those who teach upper-division literature courses often expect students to have more developed linguistic skills and cultural knowledge than they could possibly have attained in even two years of college study (or its equivalent in high school). If these faculty members do not make linguistic skills development an integral part of their literature courses, students will have more difficulty attaining the advanced level needed either to enter graduate school or to use a foreign language professionally.
Consequently, in the domain of goals (linguistic skills, cultural and literary knowledge), there is a great need for intradisciplinary discussion, so that some realistic agreement may be reached—discussion that includes senior as well as junior faculty members, literary scholars as well as applied linguists, language coordinators, and instructors. Discussion should then be broadened to include representatives of other disciplines, in order to help them determine what language skills and cultural knowledge their students should acquire.
There are many faculty members in other disciplines and many administrators who know a foreign language, and support foreign language and literature study, because they consider it relevant to both the campus academic experience and professional life beyond. It is important that foreign language faculty members join forces with such colleagues to create multilingual and internationalized networks and strategic alliances, to find ways to better integrate foreign language, culture, and literature study into the overall undergraduate experience. I think that there are, however, three dangerous ways in which language can become a more integral part of the undergraduate curriculum.
The first is as a mere service program. Today many foreign language (and literature) programs provide only lower-division language skills courses (beginning and sometimes intermediate) to other programs. The danger would remain even if other programs saw the need for the acquisition of advanced proficiencies but insisted that their students acquire them through courses that focus solely on skills, such as conversation, composition, and applied linguistics, rather than on literature. I would include in this category language courses for the professions, such as business and engineering. As James has observed, a language service program can be more cheaply staffed by part-timers or even graduate students than by full-time, tenure-track faculty members (“Bypassing” 9), particularly at large universities or in geographic areas with an abundance of native speakers. It is, moreover, language skills courses such as these that could be relegated to a language institute, ancillary to, or even independent of, the university—not an idle threat now that state legislatures frequently call for outsourcing in order to save money and undermine tenure. 1
The second danger is of being transformed into a department of literature in translation. Now, it is very important that departments of foreign language and literature be allowed to teach literature in translation and a great disadvantage when these courses are instead taught exclusively by English departments. Yet, although they can provide much needed FTEs, particularly in literatures other than Hispanic, these courses can nonetheless draw resources away from those that would help students acquire the advanced foreign language, culture, and even interpretive competencies that would allow them access to texts (literature in the broad sense) in the original language. A balance must be found between literature courses taught in English and literature courses taught in other languages.
The third danger is posed by civilization courses that purport to introduce students to an entire foreign culture in one or two semesters. They often require foreign language faculty members to teach what they were not trained to teach and what rightly belongs to other disciplines: history, art history, music history, sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy, history of science. Sometimes they contain little or no literature and often no sustained textual analysis of any sort. They may even be taught in English, particularly if they are not part of a general education program. In that case, they may actually replace foreign language or literature courses, permitting students to avoid taking foreign language courses altogether.
The common element in these three dangers is abandonment of the teaching of literature and literary criticism in the native language, with all the language and cognitive skills development, cultural knowledge, and interpretive sophistication that such teaching can bring. I think we should be clear that our overarching goal is to help students acquire advanced linguistic skills and cultural knowledge through the reading and interpretation of literature in the original language.
The best way to overcome the isolation of foreign language departments while avoiding these three dangers is to have well-defined departmental programs that integrate language, literature, and culture throughout the four years. This integrated curriculum should include many points at which it could establish links with other curricula.
Students need to be able to make connections between their foreign language and literature courses and their other courses—general education, major, or elective. Since many have not yet developed this synthesizing ability in high school, we must push them to see the relationships that we take for granted.
One approach that I have successfully used involves a portfolio requiring students to choose topics related both to my course and to their major or minor. They must keep a journal, collect information (in French) from several sources (including the Web), make an oral presentation, and write a report. Last semester in my intermediate French course, for example, a hotel and restaurant management major discussed tourism in Quebec, a criminal justice major compared attitudes toward criminals in the United States and Quebec, a political science major described the Quebec language laws, and a local agronomist talked about family farms across the border. All these topics were too narrow for inclusion in general course content and involved specialized vocabulary. The portfolio approach encourages students to establish connections between the literary selections that are part of the course and their own disciplinary interests. It shifts some of the preprofessional responsibility to the students. We cannot be all things to all students, but we can provide them with means to, in effect, add their own customized dimension to our courses.
More formalized ways of relating foreign language and literature courses are suggested by the learning community movement and involve the linking of two or more courses in various ways, including coordinated syllabi, team-taught courses, and discussion groups.
The linked-course approach would, I think, be useful at any point in the curriculum. A beginning-level ancient Greek course, for example, could be linked to a course in classical philosophy or the classical and biblical origins of Western civilization. A beginning-level French course could be linked to an introductory course in hotel and restaurant management or marketing. Intermediate-level courses could be linked to culture courses taught in English. The easiest place to create course clusters, I believe, is in the upper division, third year and beyond, where students are developing the skills to deal with somewhat longer, authentic material within a diachronic context. A course cluster on France from the Napoleonic era to World War I could, for example, include a literature course taught by foreign language and literature faculty members, courses in history, art history, philosophy, or social science theory. Faculty members would thus teach what they know best, would benefit from collegial support and discussion, and students would acquire a more integrated view of the nineteenth century. Similarly, a course on colonial Latin American literature could be linked to anthropology, sociology, and art history courses.
Linked courses are an alternative to the popular languages-across-the-curriculum approach and should be considered by colleges and universities that lack the necessary institutional climate, support structure, or resources for a LAC program (cf. Adams). Even when there is no clustering of courses or establishment of LAC links, requiring foreign language and literature courses within area studies and interdisciplinary programs is essential.
All efforts to reinforce the relation between foreign language, literature, and culture study and other fields can be enhanced by an international experience or internship (or even a domestic variant involving foreign language use). But any such experience must also be integrated into the curriculum. This can be done through the portfolio approach, including a journal and a research topic. Students should be encouraged or required to stay in contact, for example, through e-mail, with a faculty mentor on their home campus and a faculty sponsor in the international setting. After returning to the home campus, students should participate in a problem-oriented capstone seminar to which they can bring the knowledge, expertise, and linguistic competencies they have acquired.
Here, too, faculty members from all disciplines involved should meet, discuss, and agree on required levels of language proficiency and cultural knowledge for admission to the internship or international experience, as well as on the goals to be attained thereby. More realistic expectations can accordingly be set for students, and some sort of mutual understanding achieved. A mechanism for accountability would then also be established, to ensure that the entire experience is taken seriously.
Finally, we can encourage non-foreign language faculty members to investigate and teach topics that require them to use their own foreign language and culture skills. If these skills are not adequate, we can help develop them. This was a component of the Cross-Border Studies Program, funded by USDE under Title VI:A, that I directed. Through the grant, I was able to set up intensive summer sessions in French and Spanish for non-foreign language faculty members at the beginning and intermediate levels. Immediately following the sessions, some of the participants went to Quebec or Mexico to conduct research of their own choosing. Once returned, they incorporated this work into their own courses and also made presentations in the target language as part of our intermediate courses in French and Spanish. Not only did this project further the internationalization of the undergraduate curriculum, but it established a network of non-foreign language faculty members with foreign language skills. A byproduct was that faculty members realized that we now employ pedagogical methods that focus on communicative skills rather than the old grammar-translation method they had all known, and usually disliked, in high school and college. Most felt a diminution of performance anxiety and left with a more positive attitude toward foreign language learning—a definite public relations bonus.
Some of these suggestions may imply changes in the way language and literature are taught; others imply changing the way courses are structured. What they all require is (1) greater contact among foreign language faculty members within the department, (2) more contact between foreign language faculty members and faculty members in other disciplines, (3) more discussion and more sharing of ideas and information, and (4) more thought about how courses and disciplines relate to one another—about how the competence and knowledge acquired in one sphere can be transferred to another, about what skills and knowledge students can realistically acquire during their college years.
Many of the concerns that I have expressed are not limited to foreign language and literature programs. Versions can be found in otherwise dissimilar programs, from mathematics and sociology to philosophy and physics. Even seemingly invulnerable departments of English are not immune. The faculty “split, separated, weakened, divided, and ultimately conquered” (James, “Bypassing” 10) may actually be that of arts and science in general. Ultimately, given the stakes, the forum leaders cannot afford to remain above the fray.
Sylvie Debevec Henning
East Carolina University
1 The threat to foreign language and literature departments from these “freestanding language programs,” often named “institutes for language and culture,” is all too real. I suggest that, rather than wish that these programs would go away, foreign language and literature departments set them up themselves, with clearly defined goals and established links to their undergraduate curriculum. Such institutes can handle the language and culture outreach to community businesses, industry, government. They can design specialized training, special intensive sessions, customized instruction, translation services—things that are inappropriate to university foreign language and literature programs. Institutes can also prepare specialized instructional materials and modules to supplement and customize regular language instruction within the undergraduate program. But these institutes should be supervised by departments of foreign languages and literatures—not “outside the traditional language and literature departments,” but an extension of them.
Adams, Thomas M. “Languages across the Curriculum: Taking Stock.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 9–20, [Show Article]
Brod, Richard, and Bettina J. Huber. “The MLA Survey of Foreign Language Entrance and Degree Requirements, 1994–95.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 35–43. [Show Article]
Frantz, Alan C. “Seventeen Values of Foreign Language Study.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 44–50. [Show Article]
Henning, Sylvie Debevec. “The Integration of Language, Literature, and Culture: Goals and Curricular Design.” ADFL Bulletin 24.2 (1993): 51–55. [Show Article]
James, Dorothy. “Teaching Language and Literature: Equal Opportunity in the Inner-City University.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 24–28. [Show Article]
Valdés, Guadalupe. “Foreign Language Teaching and the Proposed National Foundation for International Studies.” Profession 88. New York: MLA, 1988, 3–9.
DOROTHY JAMES'S unsentimental reflections on the state of language departments are acute and sobering, and if she is right (as I think she is), the need for abrupt and deep change is urgent. No discipline can flourish long when its reward structure is at odds with its economic base, and the most trenchant of James's remarks involve the disastrous split between student (and program) needs at the undergraduate level and the scholarly and professional expectations in graduate schools. Foreign language departments are not alone in finding at odds their habitual practices and their quotidian demands in the classroom. All the issues of enrollments, markets, downsizing, and clashes of value ultimately come down to the fact that, for whatever historic reason, the way teachers and scholars are trained in graduate school does not match up sufficiently with the realities of undergraduate needs and desires, that (in other words) graduate training does not prepare new PhDs to function successfully at the level where most of them are destined to spend not only the beginnings of their careers but (at least for the near future) the rest of their teaching and scholarly lives. Deploring, lamenting, and passing resolutions that fly in the face of economic pressures are unlikely to change that, but there is hope if the profession at large has the courage to face the intellectual challenge behind the practical and financial one. James is surely right that the question is (at least in part) one of leadership, but I'm not sanguine that a simple combination of gentle persuasion and goodwill can get the job done. Exhortation in our line of work is a lovely notion, but as the comedian Joe E. Lewis noticed long ago, perhaps thinking of a different situation, “You can get more with a smile—and a gun—than with just a smile.”
The problem is not ultimately with the conception of the relationship between scholarship and teaching, but with the way that conception has been fleshed out in practice over the past half century. It is still sound professionalism and pedagogy—and good reasoning about the nature of intellectual life—to think that teaching and research need to be intimately related, and that the quality of performance in each can be made naturally to enhance the other. To reaffirm that value—and that practical possibility—is not to be romantic about our profession or nostalgic about past generations. In fact, it seems to me, there is little to be nostalgic about in actuality, for we simply haven't done a very good job historically of meshing the ideals of the classroom and of the study. Individuals—those happy few (James calls them “stars”) who have worked the present system to live the good life—may well feel nostalgic for the times when the system enabled those who, like themselves, worked hard and played by the rules to achieve some social and even financial well-being, and it is no wonder that present graduate students and young faculty members feel betrayed—tricked into falsely believing that a similar future lay before them. But that working system did not address—or did not address fully enough—the question of how teaching and research were to be fused.
It was easy to miss, in years when enrollments were always adequate and sometimes soaring—that an intellectually respectable fusion had not taken place, merely a treaty that favored a certain kind of scholarship. When there were the resources and incentives merely to reproduce likenesses of ourselves, there was no need to address the more fundamental question of what kinds of mutually dependent sets of directions needed to he mapped out in order to make the ideal of fusion work. In practice, the compromises were worked out almost totally to the benefit of scholarship (but scholarship narrowly conceived in terms of individual or small-group desire), and the intellectual base of language teaching at lower levels remained pretty much unexamined. As long as the road was more or less open to anyone, the system seemed to work: you just had to put in your unpleasant apprenticeship doing the lower-level, thankless, and boring tasks of handling beginning language courses to earn (and get) the pleasure and prestige of something better—better paid, more highly regarded, more satisfying in terms our developing profession defined. Since people who succeeded in this system continued to teach (often at the upper-undergraduate level), the fact that lower-level language teaching wasn't given much resonant thought was hardly noticed—nor was the treaty itself between the privileges and duties of teaching and research; you taught your research (at upper levels), so what was the problem?
The challenge then as it should have been articulated and understood is still the challenge now: to teach your research at the lower levels as well, to those just beginning to learn a language, or (in other words) to use the conceptual fruits of research to foster an understanding of what learning a language fully means. (There is a parallel, which I'll come to in a minute, with levels of teaching in my own home department, English.) But to take that approach would involve genuine changes not only in teaching but in research agendas as well. The challenge need not have discouraged or compromised research—quite the contrary, if fully thought through and applied—but it would have modified the directions of research, moved them more toward work on the relationship between language and larger cultural and national forces and habits, and away from individualistic, purely “literary” agendas on this or that specific textual or interpretive problem. Research would have been a more philosophical, more theoretical direction (one that was to some extent realized early on by the theoretical interests of the past two decades, before they backed away from its implications), but would have had to keep practical applications of its results continually in mind so that newly educated PhDs would have a basic pedagogy, as well as theoretical and philosophical base, to bring to bear on their language courses. And there is no reason why, right now, we cannot try anew to work out this fusion of research and teaching—this time keeping in mind the needs of both research and teaching. Such a move would be neither returning to a mythic past, nor breaking violently with it, but merely asking the same directional question in a different way. There's no future in lamenting that we didn't get the balance right, earlier, but there are lessons to learn from ideals fleshed out imperfectly—among them, that there is no fusion without compromise on both sides, and that compromise (when worked out honestly and fully) is not dishonorable but rather a genuine respecting of alterity and additional values. In an age of cultural studies when we supposedly look to the other to educate and complicate ourselves, we ought to be able to understand and implement such a proposition.
The idea of hiring a separate corps of language teachers in colleges and universities is, to me, an utterly repugnant one—not just because it gives few language PhDs a place to go or intellectual goal to aspire to and threatens the very existence of graduate programs—but (more important) because it gives up on the idea that teaching language is, or can be, a fully intellectual enterprise. A basic intellectual question is at stake here: Is the teaching of language—either a new one or one familiar to the student—just a training in usage skills, just convention and memory, or is it education in how language works, why it attaches to ideas of culture and nation and custom? Of course it would be cheaper to mount b'litz skills courses to give students a basic access to boarding the train, ordering a burger, and finding the loo. But other institutions can do that just as well (and more economically) than intellectual centers and complex academic institutions; they should be allowed to do their work, and we should patronize them when we, too, need directions in a language we want to rent briefly. But the beginning courses we offer should be of a different order and magnitude, with intellectual content, rigor, and value. If we cannot mount them successfully, we are not using years at the graduate level responsibly, and we are not teaching students to do scholarly work of an adequate kind. Real scholarship involves understanding the nature of the issues, not just retailing the ability to construe a text, reconstruct a historical moment, or develop an original historical or theoretical thesis. The production metaphor, inevitable as it may be, misleads us here, for education is not just reproduction or even representation—not even in the extended sense of these terms. University administrators, especially in times of diminishing resources and heightened competitiveness, will surely resort to the pragmatics of hiring quick-fix drillers of the rent-a-language persuasion—unless we provide them with an intellectual rationale for high-quality and complex language instruction at beginning levels and with new PhDs specifically educated to do that job. And if we can't come up with the rationale and the programs, we will deserve to lose the disciplinary war, not just the enrollment battle. But the cost would be very high in the intellectual world—and not just to those in foreign language departments.
The basic situation in English departments is not very different, though (as yet, at least) we do not face a crisis of exclusion or extinction. But we, too, ever increasingly, leave basic language instruction to skill drillers, and we have created (or allowed to be created) a whole new subset of people trained to teach English as a Second Language. The training such teachers get can be clever and important and thorough of its kind but is usually minimalist in terms of intellectual rigor and reach, a carefully carved method replicable over and over in a variety of circumstances and one that is almost infallible in getting nonnative speakers to an anglophone train (should one exist) on time. But the genius of the method is also its limitation, a fact that is emphasized by the way these programs are conceived and run, almost always as one-year master's degree programs and only rarely attached to more complex doctoral programs in some discipline. I am personally convinced that there is a real “discipline” here with enormous potential, parallel to the one I have been trying to describe for “foreign” languages and involving the language's relationship to other cultural and national and historical structures, but one obscured by the narrow notion of being trained to rent tools one does not need to understand. When ESL courses are taught in colleges and universities as part of a larger intellectual project (as they are sometimes by a talented, self-taught few), they are legitimate and challenging intellectual enterprises, perhaps as valuable as anything done anywhere in academe. But when we charge college- or university-style fees (and give credit) for the rent-a-language version of them and mount them at the where's-the-beer level, it is a scandal. Most English departments that I know have absolutely nothing to do with the ESL programs on their campus; we have in many institutions a de facto adjunct operation similar to the one threatened for declining-enrollment European languages. But the fault lies with English departments, not with the ESL professionals or the administrators who hire them; we know the need is there, and should know that the intellectual potential is there, but we have not responded responsibly. Were we to expand the horizons of ESL as part of a larger intellectual study of language and culture, we could have the basis for an intellectually exciting program that would provide needed professional teachers who were also serious scholars. There is a moral there somewhere.
On the surface, it may look (at least to us) that we in English departments have generally done better (except for ESL issues) with the language and literature and scholarly-pedagogical splits than have “foreign” language departments. Didn't we, after all (albeit grudgingly), hire some composition specialists into our midst and even admit composition theory into the list of things that we do? But twenty years after the composition battle was “won,” English departments in the major research universities and most selective liberal arts colleges stilt have basically (excuse the pun) the same composition, except that virtually all responsibility for writing courses has been dumped on the few people who fill those designated slots: they “train” and supervise all the TAs and part-timers, they teach the few composition theory offerings at the graduate level, and they work harder for less recognition from their colleagues, while the rest of us continue to go about different business, almost untouched by their discipline and its implications for reading and writing.
Reading and writing: that is what all of us in language and literature departments teach, and we forget it at our peril—in English as well as other languages. It is not just a question of who brought us to the dance, but one of how to justify one's existence intellectually and practically. (I have been implying how often the two are nearly, if not purely, one—that is, in need of careful compromise and fusion, not binary choice.) There are very sophisticated ways of teaching reading and writing, and they need to be fully theorized and historicized—and also applied at the most basic levels of course work in higher education. We may be able, sometimes actually and often delusionally, to teach larger skills as well—symbolic structures, cultural models, philosophical or political ideas—but these are matters ancillary to our central task, something we may (or may not) develop expertise on in the course of trying to learn our trade more complexly. (I acknowledge that some people get PhDs in language and literature with other aims in mind, but however laudable their intentions individually or collectively, I think they do our primary mission a disservice if they do not subordinate other aims to the central one of reading and writing, the reason we have a major place in the university curriculum.)
Not to conceive of the work we do—the languages and texts and structures we teach—as fundamental to the intellectual life and the practical skills it uses and generates is to miss huge opportunities at the graduate as well as first-year undergraduate level. My colleague Sander Gilman, quoted by Dorothy James with some discomfort, said in his MLA presidential address in 1995 that “students want to study what we want to teach” (“Bypassing” 8). His statement, while entirely correct in the broad sense in which he no doubt meant it, is not necessarily true in particular senses involving individual druthers. But we do have the resources to merge student wants with our own, if we deign to adjust our habits and practices, too; it will just take some revisions in our notions of curriculum and the nature of graduate programs to match them up. To those who regard the present situation as the measure of what can be, such a suggestion may seem radical, but it seems to me merely a logical step in the evolution of our notion of how to match ideals with reality, research with teaching. What is at stake here even more than the adaptability of individuals is the ability of traditional disciplines to adapt to changing climates and opportunities.
We are in the academic habit of smiling, making the best short-term deal we can, and praising disarmament in the wake of our makeshift treaty. We in effect abjure the gun and hand it to others, ready to complain if they use it. If we are going to feel empowered, we have to use the powers we have, not cede them away and blame it on fatalities beyond our control. The only thing that really bothers me in Dorothy James's fine essay is the minding-the-store metaphor. I object not because of the commercial shopkeeping image, but because whatever our self-effacing rhetoric, we do not run innocent mom-and-pop operations from a perspective of trade ignorance. However fond we may be of our self-image of innocents abroad in a meaner world than we know, this is not the story of Ma and Pa Kettle meet the economist. We know what we are doing and should take responsibility. We make decisions, unless we refuse to make them.
This is a time—not consciously chosen but opened to us—to rethink graduate programs and how they promote a research agenda. The question is not whether there should be a research agenda, but whether that agenda has to be defined in the way it is at present, that temporary product of the past's issues. No doubt some will regard any change at all as for the worse, an abandonment of values, a forswearing of research, and the destruction of the world as we know it. But it is not research we would be letting go of in rethinking and revising the old treaty, but the nature of the competition the old treaty once tried to address. It's time for new treaties, and not only in “foreign” languages. Either that, or let the cleansing begin.
Paul Hunter
University of Chicago
I AGREE with James that department chairs should help unify the language and literature spheres of the profession. As utopian as it seems, tenured professors who teach mostly if not exclusively literature courses must work with language teachers: “We need together to go back to the curricular drawing board and create coordinated language, literature, and culture programs, enmeshed with vocational training where it exists” (“Bypassing” 10). With an internally integrated program we can better fortify our status from the dreaded “service department” to the substantial multicultural resource we actually provide. 1
Yet such collegiality requires drastic transformations in the reward structure of the profession. In order to realize James's admirable but so-far-quixotic goal, we must convince cost-cutting administrations to give language instructors, at present rarely tenurable (including most language program coordinators), greater professorial status (if not tenure) while literature professors engaged in research would be remunerated more flexibly for excellent classroom teaching, sustained work with individual students, curriculum development, and, if possible, the teaching of language courses. The priorities of individual faculty members might then change. Professors whose tenure and salary increases depend primarily on publications might adjust their focus, which may involve “cutting into our research agenda,” as one colleague stated it. The notion of “research agenda” could be broadened to include interdisciplinary studies and language and culture teaching across the curriculum.
However, something was missing from Dorothy James's important reflections. Such a pervasive reconstruction is hard enough to achieve. Intellectual realignment within departments arouses or aggravates ideological and personal conflicts. Is the renegotiation of boundaries with “management” our final goal? Politics alone cannot guide changes necessary for the survival of the profession in the United States. Jobs are necessary, but we cannot preserve language and literature departments if we lose sight of what motivates our careers in the first place.
My hopeful, frustrating, and sometimes harrowing three years as chair of a department of Romance and Comparative Literature made plain the urgency of ethical as well as administrative leadership. Each year had its internal crises, over which hovered the university policy of balancing the budget by reducing the faculty (mercifully through attrition) while increasing student enrollments. Economic necessities directed several departmental projects; and these controversial decisions severely tested our ability to cooperate. Threats to professional self-esteem and to personal commitments—as well as to jobs—were underlying causes of discord.
Academic politics was the presenting problem. Last year the administration reexamined our foreign language programs (a three-semester level is required for graduation) with some consultation with chairpersons and language program coordinators. At the end of the fall term, unfortunately, our department, along with the other language programs, was asked to increase the non-tenure-track language instructors' classroom contact hours for the following year; to make the change a fair one the instructors would receive a significant increase in salary.
The administration, with whom we work well, was can-did: in order to save money, to make elementary and intermediate language courses more pedagogically effective, and to compete less with laboratory sections required by science courses, we should reduce language classes from six hours per week, team-taught by two instructors, to four hours per week, with a single teacher. A language instructor's schedule of three courses a semester would thus increase from a total of nine hours of classroom contact per week, usually taught with a graduate student who needed supervision, to three single-teacher courses meeting for a total of ten to twelve hours per week. Colleagues were generally dismayed at this prospect.
The negotiations between various managers were cordial, however, and the administration supported our department's pedagogical standards. Yet there was also an element of coercion. If we did not find a way to readjust the teaching schedules ourselves, the administration might bring the language requirement before the faculty, placing us once again in precarious competition with other general education requirements and the lab sciences. The jobs of many non-tenure-track colleagues were on the line, as was the strength of the language program.
When we were faced with implementing these changes, a political and ethical crisis developed within our department. James's reflections place that dilemma into an appropriately larger context: the structural gaps between the literature and language faculty members were exacerbated. (There are about 12 tenure-line professors and about 12 full-time language instructors on terminal but renewable contracts.) I hasten to add that, on the surface, collegial relations remained quite positive: tenured faculty members almost unanimously “supported the lecturers” in their outrage and anxiety about the increased teaching loads. But these gestures of goodwill and support became ideologically charged as some tenured people competed for the badge of righteousness, highlighting plain inequities that no one could remedy: e.g., non-tenure-track language lecturers are paid less, teach more classroom contact hours than the tenure-line literature faculty members.
Although the situation was resolved adequately, a residue of acrimony remains, which points to a fundamental problem raised by James: lower-paid, non-tenure-track language instructors constitute the foundation of our departments, and yet they often do not feel part of the community or, for that matter, of the profession. Colleagues in each category are evaluated and rewarded differently. Tenured professors teach fewer courses, usually interact with fewer students; they are rewarded primarily for publications, while quality teaching and service to the university and department are expected. Language lecturers are not expected to publish; teaching is their basic contribution, while service to the department and the university also influences recommendations for salary increases and contract renewal. Such was the premise, as I understood it, of James's alarm over the possible “bankruptcy,” in the near future, of foreign language and literature study in the United States. These different faculty job definitions undermine our efforts to integrate language learning with literature and culture study, one of our explicit departmental goals.
The crucial issues accurately emerge from James's useful, uncomfortable, but convincing paradigm: competition between “forums” and “workshops” at the MLA Annual Convention. The profession's leaders appear to be “stars” who attract droves of colleagues to forums, engaging us with brilliant and witty insights. Workshops at which department chairpersons stimulate open discussions about the daily functioning of the profession were sparsely attended. Without belaboring flaws inherent in such antitheses, I found her observations to be congruent with my own experience of MLA conventions. More subjectively, her paradigm reminded me of feelings of inadequacy (in my earlier years) and of questions I still harbor about whom to emulate professionally, if anyone, and how.
Before refining our notions of leadership, some important reservations. Is the number of the academic “stars”—those colleagues who apparently use the profession as a vehicle for personal ambitions and who have a looser institutional commitment—statistically significant? Are these people, and the careers we may fantasize them to enjoy, our models? We may in fact flock to the forums out of intellectual curiosity and the desire to be inspired, rather than simply to be entertained.
We can learn more about the values and practices of these prominent colleagues. Recent addresses by presidents of the MLA are concrete and practical, further enriched by contrasts of emphasis. We can emulate the genuine accomplishments of such leaders. We should not exaggerate the virtues or the shortcomings of our celebrities.
Yet the very notion of “stars of the profession” is distressing. Let us not banish recognition of lesser-known colleagues, some of whom inspired our careers, to retirement receptions or obituaries. Publications of the MLA and the ADFL might feature neglected academic biographies—and seek out colleagues from various types of institutions and several spheres of the trade. These journals should continue to integrate pedagogy and literature articles and increase the printed contact between these two types of research and reflection.
James's MLA convention paradigm, however, is only the most visible sign of our divisive academic class system. She rightly warns us that our graduate students are convincing witnesses. They are indeed “an important link between the two working parts of the profession” (10). I lament that graduate students often feel like the “lowest” in the hierarchy. When I speak with PhD candidates willing to endure years of hardship and insecurity because of their love of literature, and with enthusiastic undergraduates, I am moved to my depths, almost religiously. Serious conversations with students outside the classroom on literary or pedagogical problems overcome disparities of function. The real participation of students in departmental planning would be a boon.
James's ethical demand is clear. We who are tenured have a momentous responsibility—to our still-untenured but tenure-track colleagues, to temporary colleagues at all ranks, to PhDs who remain migrant workers or who cannot find a first job, and to students who may become, under our inspiration, committed to language and literature study to the point of wanting to emulate us. These companions justify our jobs intellectually, ethically, and economically.
Our challenge begins with that political situation. James admonishes us to take control over, and to accept even more accountability for, the future of the profession. We are especially answerable to non-tenure-track colleagues who make our careers possible. Foreign language and literature departments are increasingly vulnerable to cost-cutting administrations who want to split off language-teaching programs from the work of (relatively) better-paid literature faculty members, thus reducing the latter's numbers. But more than jobs are threatened. The community built by common devotion to language is neglected.
It may be true that internal conflicts threaten our profession most intimately. On the political level, we weaken from within when tenured literature professors and non-tenure-track language teachers communicate less than we should and exacerbate anxieties. This intradepartmental friction raises harsh questions about class (if we define class by salary and tenure, not by clothing style), gender (since women tend to predominate among the lower-paid, non-tenure-track language teachers), and, of course, the complex issue of defining literature in relation to “culture.” Working together, colleagues with different professional orientations can, one hopes, overcome distrust by learning about what the others do. To devalue some areas of a department is to destroy its integrity, functional and intellectual.
“Leadership,” in that perspective, takes on new functions. Department chairs must be the responsible directors, but their increasingly complex role as middle manager, juggling the administration's demands with the department's needs, requires significant initiative from the floor. I agree with James that chairpersons, ideally, should themselves be able to harmonize management with scholarship and teaching, helping all colleagues to revitalize their collective responsibility. If we segregate ourselves into domains, we will easily be conquered by administrations that attempt to respond pragmatically to enrollments, demographic facts, and shifting cultural trends. Colleagues must actively build community. Organizing the whole department for the common interest cannot come only from above.
The language program coordinator (LPC) can play a decisive mediating role in such departmental reorganization. The LPC is a hands-on middle manager, whose job entails fostering morale and academic excellence among the language faculty members and connecting the planning and teaching of language courses with the literature and culture offerings. I agree wholeheartedly with James that the future of our profession in the United States depends on such integration. The LPC rarely if ever receives tenure, and we should strengthen his or her status, both within the department and in relation to the administration.
James's suggestions will, of course, require significant changes in the “professional culture” (value system, manner of publicity) within the MLA itself. The apparently unequal competition James describes between forums and workshops, stars and chairpersons and workers, must be rectified. Yet the MLA and the ADFL cannot alleviate the situation by adjusting convention procedures. Administrative solutions to problems of hierarchy between language and literature faculty members are not sufficient. Surveys and statistics are guideposts, but they do not probe the inner crisis of the profession—uncertainties of vision and commitment. The emergency is spiritual.
Our students' implicit love of literature suggests solutions. All decent teachers respond to students with a combination of interest, concern, disappointment, excitement, joy. Some students we revere. But we less frequently converse with our colleagues with comparable respect. Students embody the future. Personally, professionally, and spiritually, what do our colleagues embody?
A starting point in building intellectual community is to validate differences in role and professional commitment. Empathy with colleagues helps negotiate the usual problems of personality and turf (self-interest), increasing our ability to build humane alliances and strengthen our departments. The goal of an integrated curriculum and faculty, then, helps fit our language and literature offerings into interdisciplinary programs or across-the-curriculum conceptions now supported (if only as cost-saving measures) by many smaller and middle-sized, as well as large, colleges and universities.
Yet ethical perceptions, even spiritual values, hold more momentous consequences. To act as ethical professionals may be enough, affirming our colleagues' personalities and acknowledging our shared fallibility. If I have not lost readers who sniff out any hint of religious dogmatism, stay calm, since I embrace the secular lingua franca of academia. (There is a bridge, however, between respect for persons and reverence for their potential.) My key term is “professionalism,” not the biblical conception of “the human being as an image of God.” As professionals, we strive to do our jobs well, whatever they may be.
A spiritualized professionalism fosters a sense of reverence for the ultimate values we strive to embody in our teaching. This struggle for integrity includes every member of the team: the department secretary or administrator, the custodian, language instructors, tenured and tenure-track professors, students—and the numerous individuals throughout the institution who influence our working lives. All these people, differing in status, contribute to the common goal: impeccable teaching, excellent scholarship, and the education of people. We are grateful for a clean classroom, a reliably managed and pleasant departmental office, conscientious teachers and administrators, and we admire these colleagues who contribute to our educational mission.
Our profession holds certain values to be sacred. For us, the ultimate preciousness of each and every student is an ideal to which we have committed our careers, at least implicitly. We are absorbed with words and believe in their proximity to human truth. We help silent pages speak, listen to and teach students, and communicate across the frontiers of “foreign” languages. We read, study, and interpret books and other works of art and culture, engaging in analysis and appreciation. This bold mission unites all members of language and literature departments, faculty members and administration, and places into perspective our solutions to political and economic demands.
The tensions and competitiveness, psychological and economic, that beset academic life are degrading and self-destructive. What is the inner dignity of our work? Literature teachers do not just read books, teach a few students, and take long vacations; language teachers do not just interact with students and repeat drills; department chairpersons, and many administrators, have not disregarded their educational ideals. Focus on the varieties of professionalism may reduce or alleviate the conflict that abounds when we cannot trust other people.
Beyond professionalism, however, is the call to preserve the vision of our original commitment to this odd profession—and to articulate that vision. We must not imagine, simplistically, that our motivations are purely or primarily economic or personal. Fear of extinction may force us to cooperate. Yet reverence for our shared commitment to language as a vehicle of becoming fully human is perhaps our greatest source of energy. Like successful teaching, true academic collegiality can be achieved by working together and sharing moments of insight that lead to action.
Edward K. Kaplan
Brandeis University
1 My thanks to Harold J. Berman and H. Jay Siskin for important comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
IN “BYPASSING the Traditional Leadership,” Dorothy James points to an uncomfortable truth about the situation in which our field finds itself: its division into two strands, “a small elite body of professors to write books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small group of students” and language-teaching programs, well staffed perhaps at affluent institutions, but in most cases restricted to “the teaching primarily of the lower levels of languages by low-paid part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members” (8). As a solution, James proposes asking tenure-track faculty members to refocus their efforts on developing and teaching an integrated language and literature curriculum even though their research agenda may suffer. Nothing less than the preservation of the field of foreign languages, she implies, depends on finding ways to resist and reshape the system that rewards research over teaching.
Although James's description of the plight of the language and literature teaching profession is undeniably accurate, I see pitfalls in how she frames a response to the situation. We exercise our profession in the context of a higher education system in which research is a key factor in the distribution of financial resources. Student numbers constitute the other determining factor, of course, but they alone do not decide the final outcome, either within or among institutions. The massive infusion of both public and private funds into American higher education after World War II made possible not only a dramatic expansion of the student body but also a significant rise in the quantity and quality of university research. Indeed, during the past fifty years universities, rather than private industry or government institutes, have become the primary locus of basic research in the United States. Because research plays such a crucial role in developing the new technologies and understandings that drive economic growth, the public has been willing to pump more resources into the universities than ever before, particularly to fund research in the sciences and engineering. As a consequence, average teaching loads were reduced by one-half between 1940 and 1990, despite increasing enrollments (Kerr 142). Another index of the shift in resource allocations toward research over teaching is the proportion of university funding that comes from research-targeted grants and contributions, as opposed to student fees or state government support for postsecondary instruction. At my own institution, the University of California, San Diego, federal funds for research are now roughly equal to revenues earmarked for instructional purposes, whereas ten years ago instruction-targeted income outstripped federal research funding by 25%.
The challenges these trends pose for our field are intimated by the statements university presidents make in talking to the public about their institutions. In a recent speech, the University of California president Richard K. Atkinson, argued, for example, that the state's economy demonstrates a strong connection between knowledge and wealth, in that many of its leading industries were born of university-based research. He concludes: “The discovery and application of knowledge are not at the periphery but at the heart of what research universities are all about.” If the product that university presidents boast about is the new knowledge acquired through research as well as the training and education delivered to students, it seems unlikely that we can persuade our colleagues to stop seeking security, financial reward, and prestige through research and publication. And since the economic support structure works to the detriment of any field that becomes defined as primarily a teaching enterprise, I do not think we should try to persuade them. The challenge those of us in the discipline of language and literary study must meet is to identify and propagate our knowledge product, the form of knowledge we create above and beyond what we give to students in the form of skills and cultural awareness. Unless we can do this, we will be defined as a service field and will forever get the short end of the stick when resources are passed out.
In fact, even before the current economic squeeze, our profession began to register its awareness that the traditional place of literature and language as a socially valued knowledge was no longer secure or self-evident. I see the current crisis in the content of literary study—the battles about theory, about the canon, about cultural studies—as fundamentally related to worries about whether our knowledge product is still valuable or relevant to society at millennium's end. The humanistic framework in which our discipline is grounded now seems inadequate to the cultural knowledge that is meaningful in today's world. Literature is losing its centrality in many programs. Film, television, and other forms of popular culture have become the focus of both research and teaching. Theory, in its effort to account for ever-broader sets of cultural phenomena, pulls strongly away from the specificity of both texts and individual languages. And the language-oriented side of the discipline has moved away from philology toward the science-oriented research—linguistics, psychology, cognitive science—that informs our understanding of how language is acquired and can best be taught. These diverging disciplinary mutations, which affect both teaching and research, make it increasingly difficult to forge the integrated curriculum that James calls for as a remedy to our field's current predicament.
In raising these scruples about James's deeply thoughtful article, I wish I could say I had an alternative solution to propose. I don't. The profession is finding its way through a moving landscape in which paradigm shifts in the organization of knowledge coincide with a crisis in public financing for higher education. Our path and the terrain that shapes it will evolve together. I believe, nevertheless, that amid the uncertainties there is something we can and must do. Our discipline, focusing as it does on language, culture, and the multifarious records of their conjoint expressions, has a distinct and crucial knowledge function to offer at this millennial crossroad: a critique of the present from the perspective provided by our awareness of both historical difference and cultural-linguistic difference. We elaborate and propagate our critical insight in classrooms, in curricula, in conferences, and in publications. If we are to be heard, if we are to make a difference, we cannot emphasize one at the expense of the others. Within the university and beyond, we must direct our efforts toward salvaging and achieving the revaluation of our unique knowledge product, which may not create new industries or improve marketing strategies but may offer new perspectives from which to assess their implications. And since I believe that the most revealing insights arise from the standpoints farthest from the positions at which a system's benefits converge, I want to conclude these remarks by seconding James's suggestion that we need to listen to the “workshop leaders” with special attention.
Susan Kirkpatrick
University of California, San Diego
Atkinson, Richard K. “Visions and Values: The Research University in Transition.” Pullias Lecture at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. 1 March 1997.
Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University . 4th ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.
DOROTHY JAMES and I have independently come to similar conclusions about the problems facing language departments and, even more important, about how we can make a start at solving them. My own recommendations are contained in my essay “Must We Always Be in Crisis?” included in the present issue (5–9). I had already drafted it by the time the Bulletin containing James's essay reached me. Rather than revise mine to deal specifically with points of her own analysis, I shall use this forum to engage with one of her remarks and also to suggest an additional perspective that neither of us addressed in our essays.
About the only matter on which I can take issue with James is her statement that “affluent institutions,” unlike her own, can “retain a small elite body of professors to write books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small number of students” (8). As a faculty member at one of these research institutions, I can assure her that we no longer are able to afford the luxuries she credits us with possessing.
This point was brought home to me as early as 1991, when I chaired a task force on graduate education convened to grapple with the budgetary crisis that Stanford faced during its so-called indirect-cost crisis. Part of our task was to study statistics on teaching loads, numbers of students, and administrative costs in each department throughout the university. This task force included faculty members from the professional schools as well as from the school of humanities and sciences.
The number of students whom regular faculty members in foreign language departments taught, the task force found, was conspicuously lower than that in any other segment of the university, except of course for medicine, in which the teaching of small groups of residents is supplemented by hospital duties. I can scarcely overestimate the disapproval that most members of the task force voiced at the incongruity between the student numbers that, say, an engineering or a business professor had to cope with and the tiny seminars, often with no more than two or three students, that language professors customarily offered. The task force reached a consensus—despite my argument that the language-student populace was limited both by scarce graduate-fellowship funds and by the linguistic preparation that students needed before entering a seminar—that faculty members in the languages were simply not earning their keep.
What I learned from this experience was that there is no way to maintain incongruities of this kind in enrollment in the present financial climate—not unless a field (and this is often the case with disciplines such as economics and computer science) has raised sufficient funds on its own to found an institute that can grant its researchers “time off” from their teaching commitments. Although Stanford and other universities have a goodly number of such arrangements, to anybody seeking funds of this sort in our field I can only say, “Good luck!”
At Stanford a few savings in administrative costs have already been made by linking the foreign language departments, together with the new language center and comparative literature, within a single division of literatures, cultures, and languages. But the task of bringing senior faculty members back to undergraduate teaching and eliminating the gap that James describes so articulately is still at an early stage. As my essay in this issue explains, it is important for faculty members to devise approaches to language teaching that can motivate research-oriented scholars to perform well in the undergraduate classroom and, just as important, to encourage their language students to go on to courses in literature and culture.
If research faculty members will increasingly be ministering to undergraduate needs, let me suggest that the personnel who have done most of the undergraduate teaching in recent decades also be given the opportunity to share, more than before, in the latest ideas circulating within the profession. In the painful retrenchments that we have all been undergoing—the cuts in staff, the pressure to build up enrollments in undergraduate literature and culture courses, as well as to keep enrollments from falling in language classes—it is easy to lose sight of the value, indeed, the necessity, of maintaining a research presence not only in those institutions called research universities but in undergraduate colleges and state schools that do not themselves offer the PhD.
Not that we could ever require the production of original books and articles from teachers with backbreaking loads and without ready access to research libraries. Perhaps I should broaden the meaning of what I call research and speak instead of intellectual growth. All teachers within higher education need the chance to participate in what is going on in their fields and in neighboring fields, whether as researchers or as scholars actively engaged with other people's work.
Those in universities that offer smaller teaching loads, sabbaticals, and good library resources can, indeed must, demonstrate their growth by means of publication. Yet I argue here mainly for the many who do not enjoy these privileges. Burnout is an especially common occupational hazard among beginning-language teachers, whose opportunities for intellectual growth must be guarded and enhanced if we expect them to provide their students with informed and stimulating teaching over long stretches of time.
This growth would involve keeping up with what is going on in one's own and neighboring fields, from language pedagogy to literary and cultural theory. And it would assume a number of forms—going to conferences, participating in faculty seminars and discussion groups, attending summer faculty-renewal seminars, as well as the constant encouragement from colleagues and mentors to seek out opportunities for the funding of projects to which they feel committed.
For those practitioners who have had only limited exposure to undergraduates in recent decades, the shift I am recommending to a better balance of undergraduate and graduate teaching, including some service in beginning-language classes, could well mean some decrease in research “productivity.” These faculty members might remember, however, that until the 1950s, undergraduate teaching, including language pedagogy, was central to a scholar's work even in the so-called elite universities. And even during the intervening decades, while modern language specialists at these institutions came to view themselves preeminently as graduate faculty members, at least one language field, namely classics, kept up the tradition that a presence in elementary language teaching was part of one's professional identity.
My accompanying essay has some things to say about the role that faculty members play in helping shape a graduate students professional identity. If, as I suggest, we give doctoral students realistic expectations from the start about the kinds of careers they are likely to lead, we may greatly reduce the discontent that scholars feel whenever they are asked to adjust to major institutional changes. One might remember that most students enter graduate study because of the influence that their best undergraduate teachers have exercised as role models. If we can all provide the right models from their early language training through their senior classes, we shall train precisely the sorts of people appropriate to our profession in the coming years.
Herbert Lindenberger
Stanford University
IN OUR response to Dorothy James's provocative and courageous essay “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership,” we follow three paths: an analysis of James's conceptual framework, a rearticulation of James's main points, and a discussion of the relationship of literary studies and teaching to language study and teaching in foreign language departments in the United States. We use our own diverse experiences and observations in over thirty years of teaching French language, linguistics, literature, and culture, as well as our exchanges with colleagues at a variety of high schools, colleges, and universities. We also refer to the Wisconsin at Madison model to propose alternative diagnoses and prognoses. We are aware of the dangers of relying on one's own experience to generalize about an entire field. No single institution is typical, and some are more atypical than others. Columbia University, for example, to which James refers, is an extreme example of the split between literature teaching and language teaching. The Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is atypical in the size of its faculty (6 in Italian and 20 in French), in the fact that it has tenured faculty members who are language coordinators, and, most important, in the fact that many of the language coordinators are also teachers of literature and culture. But in other aspects, it is fairly typical of a foreign language department in a large public research university.
We would like to begin by complicating what we perceive as the simplified context in which James situates the problem she describes. Foreign language departments in the United States today are beset by problems that are both internal and external. The external problems, with which we are all familiar, include a deep national suspicion of learning for the sake of learning and a lack of serious intellectual and financial commitment to the study of foreign languages for reasons other than pragmatic concerns (tourism, business, etc.). Although these problems cannot be rehearsed every time one writes or speaks about the state of foreign language learning in the United States, they do need to be recalled, because they set the stage for internal problems as well.
Language rather than literary specialists in our foreign language departments are often represented as the practical ones as opposed to the theoretical and speculative ones—that is, as the partisans of the real world in contrast to the dwellers in the ivory tower. Having used these oppositional terms, we must also insist on the dangers inherent in binary oppositions that lead to false dichotomies. It is simply not true that the “workshop leaders” are “the people who chair departments” (“Bypassing” 5). Literary scholars and administrators are quite often the same. It is tempting, once one has made the distinction between “forum leaders” and “workshop leaders,” to use this dichotomy as an organizing principle, but it is not an accurate basis on which to build an analysis. Furthermore, it leads to a Manichaean, good guys-bad guys split in which all the blame for what has gone wrong in foreign language departments over the years is attributed to the elitist “forum leaders,” whereas the “workshop leaders” are represented as the hardworking, altruistic, unrecognized rescuers. If there is blame to be attributed, it can easily be shown to exist on both sides. If some literary scholars are not interested in language teaching, it is also true that some language specialists treat literary study as an elitist activity and are themselves in the awkward situation of having an insufficient knowledge of the language they teach and a superficial grasp of literary and cultural studies. Many language specialists neither read not study regularly in the target language; they even tend to avoid consulting scholarly dictionaries and grammars. Many pass their superficial knowledge on to their Students, student teachers, or teaching assistants, thereby creating a force of passionate “how-to” methodologists for whom it becomes difficult to communicate and cooperate with colleagues engaged in various forms of literary and cultural studies. It must be stressed, moreover, that literary scholars are deeply engaged in some form of language study. Many contemporary literary theories are based on principles of theoretical linguistics or use philological and etymological analyses to construct the interpretation of literary texts. There tends to be, therefore, an unequal balance between literary scholars and language teachers: literary scholars also teach about language and how it functions in a literary text; many language specialists use a few literary texts in an ancillary and superficial manner.
Another factor James mentions that needs to be reiterated is that learning another language is difficult. We do not tell our students this; we do not even acknowledge the fact sufficiently to ourselves and to one another within the academy. And the common two-year requirement at the college level is too little, certainly not enough for students to acquire the ability to understand, speak, read, and write with ease (if not with mastery) in another language. What we should be doing more than we currently do is to teach our students how to learn, and how to continue learning, outside the classroom. And perhaps some high schools and colleges have overemphasized the “oral proficiency” model and not paid sufficient attention to the one skill that can endure beyond official schooling: reading.
We agree with James that the split that has developed between literary scholars and language teachers is a source of frequent friction and at times disarray within foreign language departments, but we disagree with both her analysis and her proposed cure. James writes: “The best hope of a genuinely high-level, multiple-option education in foreign languages surely lies for many of us in having one faculty that will work with language in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the highest level of literacy for our students. What such a model entails, however, is a big change in the way professors now teaching in advanced undergraduate literature programs and in graduate programs view and conduct their professional lives” (8).
We, too, think that professors of literature need to change their attitudes and become more interested and involved in the linguistic and intellectual quality of the work done in the language classroom, as well as become more understanding of the repetitious and often tedious nature of language teaching and of the difficulties inherent in the effort to teach a foreign language to young adults. However, we would suggest that the “big change” may have to be even bigger for those who teach language. Our colleagues who are professional language teachers should become more lucid about the shocking lack of intellectual content in many language classes and textbooks at both the high school and the college level, the inanity of exercises focused at the sentence level, the repetition of oversimplified, context-free grammar rules, and the use of trivial, factual cultural tidbits. Essentially, professional language teachers ought to become more aware of their own limitations, more aware of the discrepancy between their goals and the real outcomes (many language majors never reach the advanced level of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines), and between the lower-level language courses and the upper-level literature, culture, and language courses. Professional language teachers need more training in theoretical linguistics, including the principles of phonetics, diction, and oral discourse strategies; those who are not native speakers often need more training in the syntax and semantics of the language they teach, as well as in literary and cultural studies. They must move away from a reliance on methods and “materials” and toward learning how to deal with intellectual content and language processes at the same time in the classroom.
The Wisconsin at Madison model is certainly not flawless, but it contradicts many of the dichotomies found in “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership.” Several members of our French faculty in Madison (3 of whom also happen to be native speakers) teach regularly, both in the lower-level language Courses and in the upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. They also supervise and coordinate the teaching of graduate TAs and plan the curriculum in the lower-level language courses. This means that there is an obligatory interaction between these colleagues and those who teach methods and language courses. Although friction and sometimes even open conflict occur between the two groups, there is a constant effort to consult and to discuss. It would, however, be ridiculous to ask the so-called stars to teach in the beginning-language program—unless, of course, they enjoyed doing so, and a few do. At Madison, we are indeed fortunate to have a sufficient number of colleagues in the French section of our department who are deeply committed to teaching at different levels. And in the Italian section, all professors have always taught language, literature, and culture at all levels. Certainly this collaboration is beneficial to the program, but it is not in itself a panacea. Even if all members of a language department were willing and able to teach courses and seminars at all levels, there would still be problems.
One of these problems is how we write about the difficulties we face. The second part of James's title, “Who's Minding the Store?,” is an example of an infelicitous “image” that sets the writer and her readers on false paths. A language department in a college or university is not a freestanding store. It is part of a larger whole whose socio-economic, political, cultural, and intellectual positions dictate conditions, many of which cannot be changed by a single department alone. In a similar manner, the operations of departments are evaluated and judged by committees and groups outside as well as inside the department. Using “store” as a metaphor leads logically and inevitably to extensions of the metaphor, such as “selling,” “customers,” “concrete goods,” as well as to “bankruptcy” and “debts.” James's metaphor, prompted by a facile choice of hackneyed words rather than by a rigorous analysis, becomes an apocalyptic vision that seems to he excessively pessimistic. In reality, there is no store and no bankruptcy. There are transformations within the academy and within disciplines, and these transformations have created a variety of problems for which there may be local and temporary solutions. An important beginning would be to discard misleading metaphors, to avoid binary oppositions and the search for definitive answers, and to consider collectively the strengths and weaknesses of individual faculty members, whatever their official title and position within a foreign language department might be. There is no “store” to “save,” but there are intellectual and organizational tasks that demand our immediate and imaginative pedagogical attention.
Yvonne Ozello
Elaine Marks
University of Wisconsin, Madison
THERE is much to praise in Dorothy James's insightful jeremiad about the foreign language profession: we are in the midst of problems and changes that challenge our traditional assumptions about foreign language programs and that expose the hollowness of many of our existing institutional structures. Thoughtful and determined leadership, as demonstrated by James and her colleagues at Hunter College, is an urgent necessity, but the problem, I believe, extends well beyond a crisis of leadership and beyond the admitted gulf between the spheres of solitary scholarly stars and collegial administrative workers.
If not the root of all evil, money and the current fiscal situation of our colleges and universities throw a harsh light on our plight. Not too long ago, a university vice president asked a colleague the following question: “Why should I hire a tenure-track assistant or associate professor to teach [you fill in whatever language you wish] when I can hire some unemployed PhD as a lecturer for $22,000?” The question is, of course, rhetorical and seeks neither an intellectual nor an ethical response about the policies for hiring foreign language faculty members. Against that kind of reasoning, arguments for an integrated language and literature curriculum have little or no force. For all the administrators who assert that “foreign languages are expensive”—a phrase that one hears increasingly these days, as if molecular biology and law were discounted offerings in the university store—an ,argument about the profound humanistic values of language teaching seems to be of little avail. I find the vice president's question fascinating, not simply because it is crass and crude but more because it betrays a fundamental scorn for the entire foreign language enterprise. The question masks three disturbing, related assertions: (1) teaching is of no real consequence, (2) there is no need to cater to the powerless (non-tenure-track), and (3) foreign languages are not worth investing in. The related opposite assertions are obvious enough: (1) scholarly research counts, (2) the tenured faculty rules, and (3) other fields are of greater value.
The contradictory assertions say much about the current malaise in American academia. There is no college or university in this country that does not enthusiastically promote the value of undergraduate teaching. Read the documents sent to prospective students, and read the literature sent to alumni to solicit generous and regular contributions: our country is overrun with master teachers eager to work closely and frequently with their undergraduate students. “Excellence in teaching” is the mantra common to all our institutions. But teaching does not bring in research grants, does not attract graduate students, and apparently does not bring prestige. In many institutions the sheer number of teachers necessary for foreign languages or the irregular enrollment patterns, be it in megaprograms like Spanish or in the small-enrollment programs like African or Southeast Asian languages, undoubtedly preclude swelling the ranks of the permanent faculty, but that number does not require the two-tiered system of haves and have-nots, of lords and underlings, and of queen bees and drones. If the value of an academic field is other than financial (the amount of external grants and of indirect costs brought to the institution), then one might well ask why foreign languages seem so often to reside at the bottom of the barrel. There are many reasons, and given the limitations of space here, I shall suggest only some of them in what is admittedly a telegraphic and unsubtle manner.
The American environment, despite the endless calls for internationalization, remains inimical to foreign languages. English is the world language, and that grip becomes more pervasive and stronger year by year. What do a Swede and a Spaniard speak to each other? In what language does an Egyptian conduct business in Taiwan? Which language has almost more students than native speakers? English. Second languages in the States suggest to many people either end of the social scale: either immigrants or elitist cosmopolitans. The motivation for committed language learning in this country is like the language enrollments: low and embarrassing. The motivation for sustained learning is weakened not by the system of foreign language education but by the fundamental unwillingness of our citizens to learn. “I'm a language cripple.” “I can't learn another language.” “I had two years of French, and I can't understand a waiter in a café.” Such meaningless litanies confirm a national problem.
What it means to teach and learn a foreign language remains severely misunderstood by the general academic audience, and certainly by parents, governing boards, and legislatures. Faculty members, administrators, and students alike seem to perceive language learning in ways that are antithetical to the enterprise. Some perceive learning as a merely mechanical task in which, despite the supposed death of the grammar-translation method and the audio-lingual method, learning can be accelerated (the current jargon is “made more productive”) by computers and in which the mastery of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax is equated with “knowing” the language. Others perceive language learning as no different from first language acquisition; if a three-year-old can speak, why can't a college sophomore? The very phrase “language learning” thus remains bound to lower-level skills, to basic training, and to linguistic performance. Few people seem to understand that language learning, even in one's first language, is a lifelong task.
At the same time, we face an inflation of demands on foreign language programs: students are to be proficient speakers, sensitive and agile readers, masters of rhetoric, and acute observers of the foreign culture—and, once again, these tasks are to be accomplished as rapidly as possible. The positive developments of foreign languages across the curriculum and languages for specific purposes place yet greater demands on teachers and students. Much has changed in the past three decades, and prominent among those changes is the definition of language in language programs. Without rehearsing a comprehensive history of the definitions of language and without assuming that we all employ the same definition, we can nonetheless reasonably suggest that the earlier notion of surface structures and the later notion of deep structures, whatever their place in linguistics, have shown themselves to be inadequate for foreign language teaching and learning. Sociolinguistic notions of language as social practice reveal both the new orientations and the broadening task that language learning must become (Kramsch).
The endless parade of solutions—the methodologies with embarrassingly silly names contradicting one another and promising much and delivering less—does little to suggest stability and reasoned improvement. Having essentially given up on methodological panaceas, many institutions now seek structural solutions—various forms of language centers, appointments of language “czars,” massive investments in technology. Be it methodology or be it structural innovation, such solutions tend to be “topdown,” imposed without due consideration of faculty needs and talents. It is leadership by fiat rather than leadership by understanding.
Look at the MLA job list these days, and frequent among the slim pickings are announcements for foreign language professionals, or foreign language pedagogues, or foreign language methodologists, or foreign language specialists, or applied linguists, or second language acquisition specialists, or foreign language acquisition specialists, perhaps even some other designation, such as multimedia specialists in foreign languages. The nomenclature varies, but the announcements boil down to the same thing: “Such-and-such institution wants someone to take care of the foreign language thing.” As they search for methodologies and structural solutions, colleges and universities are now seeking new kinds of foreign language faculty members, but there is scarcely consensus on what kind of training and background makes for the ideal candidate.
We are in the midst of turf wars over who controls foreign language instruction in higher education. The wars are intellectual, and they are political. The kind of distance we have customarily seen between specialists in literature and language teaching, we now often see between different kinds of “language specialists.” While the outside world lumps “foreign language professionals,” “foreign language pedagogues,” “foreign language methodologists,” “foreign language specialists,” “applied linguists,” “second language acquisition specialists,” “foreign language acquisition specialists” together as signifying the same kind of thing, those phrases represent different kinds of expertise and training. Does it need to be said? There are campuses where the applied linguist does not consider the methodologist a worthy colleague, where the linguist with methodological training is suspicious of the foreign language pedagogue, and where second language acquisition specialists have a research agenda and little interest in the practical management of language programs. This is the disarray of a complex and changing field.
The place of foreign language faculty members in the traditional college and university remains open to debate and dissension. While some institutions—most often public institutions—incorporate foreign language faculty members into the regular tenure-track line, others—private colleges and universities—employ widely differing alternatives, often the special ranks of lecturer and senior lecturer, for good and bad reasons. I have written at length on what is termed the governance problem and shall not repeat those observations here (Patrikis). Suffice to say that the place of foreign language faculty members mirrors an institution's conception of the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Without a clearly defined intellectual direction of language teaching and learning that moves well beyond performance criteria (just proficiency) to a conception of language learning that includes performance and declarative knowledge (Chaput; Patrikis), then language teaching and learning remain stepchildren in higher education.
We are cursed to live in interesting times, and if I had all the solutions to the problems that I adumbrate here, I would retire a contented man. But I doubt that there are easy, general solutions. Our colleges and universities differ greatly from one another; the varying constellation of resources will not allow the imposition of external solutions. The problems themselves are moving targets, assuming different forms in different institutions and changing with the academic calendar within institutions. While I find myself agreeing with Dorothy James, I also find myself arriving at an opposite conclusion. We do not have a crisis of leadership as much as a crisis of individual responsibility. The choices—intellectual, curricular, methodological, technological, and so on—are so numerous that only individual teachers working in individual classrooms will be able to make sane and salutary decisions about what constitutes effective teaching and a strong program. I do not know whether it is a naturally skeptical temperament that precludes my conceiving of global change in the profession or whether it is simply the experience of seeing positive change occur gradually and by individual initiative.
Peter C. Patrikis
Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning
Chaput, Patricia R. “Difficult Choices: Planning and Prioritizing in a Language Program.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 29–34. [Show Article]
Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching . Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Patrikis, Peter. “The Foreign Language Problem: The Governance of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning.” Redefining the Boundaries of Foreign Language Study . Ed. Claire Kramsch. Boston: Heinle, 1995.
AS A member of the profession trained in literature and language who has spent a large part of his career working toward redefining the discipline, I am sympathetic to Dorothy James's wish for reform. I, too, am aware of the bifurcation in our field between administrative and intellectual leadership. The former keeps the departments and profession running, and the latter holds forth at MLA conferences on esoteric literary topics of concern to only a few. Admittedly, I exaggerate. I do so because James is confusing the problem by setting up such broadly undifferentiated categories. Early on in her essay she states, “I am not referring here to leaders of the two branches of our profession whose separation has been much discussed, the branches of language and literature” (5). While she claims that her focus is administrators and scholars, her own position as a “language teacher” permeates the entire piece and tends to elide the administrator with the language teacher or coordinator. Many of her negative examples—the establishment of language centers, the growth of cultural and interdisciplinary studies, and the cutback in language programs—point to the dichotomizing of language teachers and literature professors. I wonder why she dissimulates here, thus skirting the issue about which she has a great deal to say. I also question the wisdom of continuing to reinforce the dichotomies that she so strongly condemns.
I address these points because I think the problem is precisely the separation of language and literature in the curriculum that continues to be practiced even by the division of MLA journals devoted to pedagogy and administration ( ADFL and ADE ) and literary scholarship ( PMLA ). Unfortunately, unlike the MLA, which has taken some steps to correct the imbalance, James sees cultural and interdisciplinary studies as the culprits, since they are “doing the teaching in English, thus quietly eliminating any attempt at language teaching beyond the elementary and intermediate levels” (7). As someone who has worked diligently to establish cultural and interdisciplinary studies as a way to enhance enrollment in language and literature departments, specifically in German, I find her critique somewhat misdirected. Just because one tries to expand the notion of studying “German” beyond a narrow definition of literary text in the German language in order to include cultural representations of all kinds does not mean that the German language is going down the drain. The point of creating, for example, German studies was precisely to offer more opportunities to students who wanted to broaden their knowledge of Germany, albeit not only through literature. Yes, many of these courses are in English, but our hope was that students would be inspired to take courses in German after recognizing that a facility in the language was necessary for serious work. In my notion of German studies, language has always been a central component. It behooves all German studies programs to make it a foundational part of their curriculum and to require their students to have proficiency in the language. There are, of course, historical reasons embedded precisely in the German Romantic tradition that would make it unthinkable to separate the teaching of language from the teaching of literature. However, I have continued to make the point that the notion of text must be understood more broadly than as just literature, to include other kinds of cultural and aesthetic representations. To support this point historically, one can even invoke German Romantic tendencies, particularly those fundamental to the linkage of language, thought, and culture represented in thinkers like Herder, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Grimm. I do not intend here, though, to equate literary study with retrograde positions. On the contrary, studying literature as part of a more encompassing cultural studies engenders more possibilities for the literary text, as well as offering a more progressive pedagogical potential.
I still have not produced an adequate response to James's complaints. My theoretical asides are perhaps just as insufficient as Sander Gilman's explanations of the dilemma which James roundly criticizes (8). Ultimately, the leadership question that is tied to the language question seems almost unsolvable, since it has to do with institutionally based notions of status and prestige in our profession. As underprivileged members of the profession, women have made up the bulk of language teachers and coordinators. The majority of “stars” in literary studies are men, even though women form the majority of graduate students in language and literature departments. Gender distinctions, however, tell only part of the story. Success is counted in numbers of books from prestigious presses and articles in first-rate journals, and not in teaching and administration.
The reward system in the university has to change if the structure of the university is to support the kinds of people—departmental administrators and language teachers—that James sees as disadvantaged. Again, cultural studies seemed to me to offer, in their interdisciplinarity and the blurring of genres, the possibility of bringing pedagogy closer to scholarship. 1 By seeing culture as the bridge between language and literary studies, I had hoped teachers of language could anthropologize their work, while literary scholars would recognize how meaningful it was to engage more substantively with the constitutive nature of cultural contexts for building meaning in literature. 2
This exchange has happened only in rare cases, such as in the work of Claire Kramsch or Heidi Byrnes, who are devising integrated undergraduate curricula in which language is taught in a cultural—literary context. However, no matter how great their success in this effort, these two scholars are still primarily identified with language pedagogy. Some of us in literary studies who have refocused Our efforts toward German studies are trying to bridge the gap. Yet teaching language remains for many a task from which to escape. Even while significant research is produced by applied linguists—language pedagogists—the “best” graduate students at the “best” universities emulate their literature professors and make their names in the field by doing the same kind of research. In short, academic capital is accrued through literature and not language teaching.
To change the system requires a unified effort precisely on the part of these so-called stars in the higher echelons of language and literature departments—that is, if they believe that language teaching should be recognized because it is central to the life and future of the department. While many may accept this claim in principle, they do not, I fear, accept the comparison based on intellectual merit, which is the criterion that divides these two groups. Their bad faith is located precisely at the level that should join us in a common academic endeavor. Most literary scholars, especially the most well-known, simply think they are more important than their colleagues who teach language. The evolution of the profession to a field that primarily studies literary texts narrows the categories of expertise. Applied and pragmatic, the skills of the language teacher are not seen to be as sophisticated, as advanced, or as theoretical as those of the critic. Many feel that anyone can teach language but not everyone can interpret Kafka or Benjamin, or analyze Foucault or Bakhtin.
To challenge this model, as many of us have been trying to do, is an uphill fight. Of course, the more colleagues are tenured and promoted, the greater the critical mass, and the greater the hope for a more synthetic department of language, literature, and culture. Perhaps the answer is also generational. Younger scholars, many of whom are trained in cultural studies, have more awareness of the pedagogical dimensions of their work and their research. We have the job of reeducating our colleagues and of educating a new generation of students to the benefits of mutual respect and commitment to both fields of study. Over time, if there are any German departments left, we might have, in this shrunken discipline, scholar-teachers committed to both, who see that administration and the teaching of language have an intellectual component to them that is challenging and creative, albeit different from the work of the traditional literary critic.
Finally, one can offer a more cynical alternative. Give up the fight and accept the status quo, accept the dichotomy and train our students in all honesty about who they are in the profession and what role they will play. Those who study applied linguistics will recognize that their role is second class, compared to the work of literary critics. Don't make the literature students teach the language, and even separate the study of literature from the teaching of language. Create a two-tiered program and department, with different teaching loads, research agendas, and salaries. Language teaching becomes an adjunct to serious scholarly research and study. When this is accomplished, there will be no need for departments of foreign languages; all literature can be taught in translation, and, most sad, language teaching becomes merely a service function, no different from learning a new computer program. Divorced from its cultural substance and context, language will have no future.
Such a scenario seems extreme. Yet we have to be vigilant, since as professors and teachers of literature, language, and culture who share our professional lives in a department, we have some responsibility for our colleagues who do work that differs from our own. While the system within which we work does indeed determine our intellectual, professional, and curricular agendas, we still have some power to change it by making demands on our students, colleagues, and administrators. We can establish curricula to ensure such crossovers. We can redesign our graduate and undergraduate programs to reflect such collaboration and linkages, and we can make resources available for innovative work that transcends disciplinary boundaries while still requiring language proficiency to consolidate that intellectual interest. We should also seriously consider, as James suggests, “teach[ing] language skills up to and through the graduate level” (10). While I am not sure that research and teaching are as mutually exclusive as James implies, I do think some reallocation of resources will be necessary. Ultimately the change requires commitment in the department led by the kind of chair James herself is: forceful and visionary, prepared to realign intellectual and professional standards within the department and at the university level as well.
Jeffrey Peck
Georgetown University
1 See, for example, work by Giroux; Gore; and Graff.
2 For more elaboration on this point, see Peck.
Giroux, Henry. Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Gore, Jennifer. The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.
Peck, Jeffrey. “Towards a Cultural Hermeneutics of the ‘Foreign’ Language Classroom: Notes for a Critical and Political Pedagogy.” ADFL Bulletin 23.3 (1992): 11–17. [Show Article]
DESPITE all the changes that the teaching of foreign languages on the college level have undergone during the past few years (the transformations in language pedagogy, the passage from audiovisual methods to computer-based instruction, the declining enrollments in French and Russian, and the spectacular rise of Spanish, Middle Eastern, and East Asian languages), some perennial problems in departments of national languages and literature seem intractable. Dorothy James's thought-provoking and provocative article rings the changes on the oft-decried split between two categories of professors—professors of literature and professors of the practice—that is cast here as a crisis of leadership. There are the forum leaders, the stars, the speakers who draw the big MLA crowds, the top publishing scholars; and then there are the workshop leaders, the people who chair departments, who deal with the day-to-day business of staffing courses, of working with faculty members and administrators.
This split, on whose universality the article's argument rests, seems to me a weak one, in that, as James immediately recognizes, many stars have proven to be capable administrators, notably Stanley Fish, former chair of the Duke University Department of English, whom she singles out for blame. And one could name many others. This passage concludes rather lamely, I think: “Nonetheless there are two different spheres in which they play their roles as leaders” (6).
There is no question that the problem of articulation between lower-level language courses (generally well enrolled) and upper-level literature courses (often underenrolled) requires constant vigilance and creative solutions. This is not news. Furthermore, the class system between a floating population of graduate students, instructors and benefitless adjuncts, and underrecognized professors of the practice, on the one hand, and relatively privileged tenured faculty members who are enabled to pursue, and are rewarded for pursuing, their research agendas, on the other, does nothing but foment resentment. Even so, in at least two institutions where I have taught—admittedly elite institutions—the language coordinators are not only not treated as lower-status members of the departments but are regarded as skilled professionals and as respected equals. Finally, because these departments are small, everyone has to pull his or her weight administratively.
While agreeing with James's basic points and concerns—and who would disagree?—I want to take issue with her overriding argument: Is it really fair—not to say accurate —to point the finger at the “stars” and to blame them for our current crisis of leadership, the bankruptcy of the store? Several points need to be made.
1. The university, and the national literature departments, do not exist in splendid isolation; they are caught up in larger economic and political forces. If retiring faculty members who were tenured during the boom years of the 1960s are not being replaced, it is not because they have outlived their usefulness; it is, rather, because, as James recognizes in passing, our fin de siècle is marked by a crisis in employment, otherwise known as downsizing. The current breakdown of the foundational difference between the university and the corporate world is having deplorable consequences in all aspects of the production and dispensation of knowledge.
2. The constant mention of the language and literature split neglects one of the lessons my generation of scholars learned the hard way: students who are interested in learning a language are not necessarily interested in going on to read literature in that language—hence the proliferation of multitrack majors, joint concentrations, and the popularity of cultural studies approaches in departments of foreign languages, notably the European.
3. While it stands to reason that bean-counting administrators will look with some disapproval at classes composed of a few students taught by high-salaried professors, it is equally true that the prestige of departments of foreign languages, what indeed makes them university departments, originates with the research professors those whom James feels, somewhat punitively, should be required to pitch in. Administrators are wont to look askance on decapitated language departments, viewing them as mere service departments whose work might be done more cheaply and efficiently outside the university walls.
We as a professoriat are indeed vulnerable, but reshuffling departmental FTEs does not strike me as more than Band-Aid therapy for what ails us and threatens our graduate students' futures: the widespread replacement of workers with full benefits, by adjunct or half-time personnel, deprived of benefits; the invasion of the classroom by cyberteaching; the pervasiveness of visual culture. Though I may not agree with James's palliatives, I welcome her challenge to the status quo and her invitation to rethink the mission and the structure of foreign language departments.
Naomi Schor
Harvard University
THE perception that the leadership in foreign languages traditionally was not involved in language teaching is, as far as I know, incorrect. At least until the 1960s, most professors of German, for instance—including some who can be called leaders, like Frank Ryder, Ernst Feise, Bernhard Blume, and Edwyn Zeidel—were strongly involved in language teaching or made it part of their service to the department. The elite attitude of literary scholars that Dorothy James describes so well seems to have been the result of a particular expansion of the formerly relatively frugal American academy between the 1960s and the 1980s. In the field of German, this expansion was intensified by a strong brain drain of younger Germanists who found many American departments more hospitable than their alma maters in Germany. They added intellectually to the field but did not add to its functioning—and self-reflection—within the academy (until later). More important, the cold war in general and Ronald Reagan's conservative agenda in particular provided a bonus for the academic humanities, which allowed an inward-looking hierarchization to take place that had little to do with the actual educational and budgetary needs of the university.
The MLA has come to realize this, as James points out, but the question is whether we have to invent the wheel again in order to find our way back to a pragmatically structured combination of language and literature instruction in the advanced undergraduate classes.
James makes a valid plea for a change in attitude within the profession on the basis of which the instruction of foreign languages in college and university departments can still claim to be superior to the Berlitz, or language center, approaches. After participating in numerous workshops and having been a workshop leader on the local level, I think I have seen enough of my colleagues to state that her plea has been made before, though rarely so eloquently and convincingly. In the early 1990s such a plea was in tune with the general realization by forum leaders, as she calls them, in English and foreign language departments, that the ivory tower, which had provided amenities for old and new stars, was not sustainable anymore. In the second half of the 1990s, the situation has been transformed again: a change in attitude, while still important, does not suffice. Heidi Byrnes, by organizing a wide-ranging series of panels, with many colleagues in the American Association of Teachers of German, on saving the discipline through improved language instruction, has made this clear (at least to me). My admiration for her includes her frank admission that we know what we have to do but we do not know yet how to do it.
And here is where I think I should return to the beginning of James's article, where she sets up the topic of administering the store, and ask: Shouldn't we address more forthrightly the structures of administration and governance of departments and programs through which the changes can be implemented? She is right in stating that there has been a silent accommodation to many privileges, especially for literary scholars, and that certain privileges will have to go if departments want to survive with a common purpose. But there is also the power play of deans and administrators, which shapes curricula and instruction. And there is the professional representation of foreign languages, an area in which the MLA—and I mean the MLA, not the ADFL—has internally not always generated sufficient support and know-how. At this moment, however, our governance within the universities and colleges is in need of a review.
Frank Trommler
University of Pennsylvania
I HAVE this recurring nightmare. Fifteen years after graduating, a student comes up to me, points an accusing finger at her former professor, and says: “I feel cheated. I know all about identity politics, but I still can't tell the difference between ser and estar . And while it's a relief to know I can probably order roast beef in Spanish and not get braised bistro, I still feel starved. All I got was intellectual and cultural pap. There was nothing to grow on, to nurture my intelligence, my soul. So where's the beef?” Am I alone here? Are there other professorial souls out there wondering whether we have forgotten why we came to be teachers and what it is we wanted to impart? Do we know?
These and other such disquieting night thoughts were prompted by Dorothy James's inciteful article on the so-called language and literature divide. James is responding to a trend toward separating language and literature into different programs. Like James, I am completely opposed to such a separation, which I find intellectually, culturally, and pedagogically unsound and, to be blunt, an academic scam. It is argued that since language and literature programs seem to go their own way and have their own goals, why not establish different units, specifically a language center and a literature department, thus capitalizing on their respective strengths and missions? “If Mom and Dad want a divorce, [then language learning and literary study] had better get one,” suggests one colleague, Robert Schoenberg (James 7). I find this analogy not only uncompelling but unwarranted. Because unlike married couples, we in departments of language and literature have no divorce option. Language and literature are cultural inseparables. Language is culture. How can you teach the uses of ser and estar without exploring what it means to be Spanish or Peruvian or Argentinian? How can you understand linguistic difference if you don't couple it to historical and cultural context?
Some of what is fueling this movement is fear—fear of administrative and financial threats of retrenchment, even abolishment of entire programs. The fear in many places is real. It is, however, not new. Younger colleagues may not be familiar with the turbulent atmosphere and changes that took place in the early 1970s within academia. The job market in the humanities fell through the floor. Colleges and universities, beset by financial and other difficulties, faced, in turn, demands for curricular reforms, some of which were ideologically driven, some economically, but rarely, in my view, intellectually or educationally justified. A key issue was the language requirement; its elimination from many degree programs resulted in much-reduced language and literature departments and majors in some cases and, in others, their disappearance. As an inexperienced ABD teaching part-time at a small liberal arts college in 1971, I vividly remember attending a heated debate (and vote) on this very issue at a faculty assembly. I was appalled at the specious level of argument and the apparent disregard for questions of intellectual import evidenced by some of those opposed to the language requirement. But I was even more distressed by the apologetic posture of colleagues in language and literature programs supporting its retention. Although the motion to abolish the requirement was narrowly defeated (and the requirement was later reinstituted in many places), the experience sorely tested my vocation and my faith in both collegiality and academic integrity.
What I learned from that dip into the abscesses of academic politics was highly instructive. The issue was not educational philosophy but power. Foucault and company aside, I learned not to take power for knowledge. Knowledge may be a form of power, but confusing and blurring the distinctions between the two under the guise of hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) agendas is an abuse. While the circumstances and context are different today, the issue is not. The language and literature divide is a smokescreen. In times of economic scarcity and competing interests for shrinking resources, solutions are sometimes sought that bear the seal of administrative approval but do not withstand sober scrutiny. In other words, solutions are produced for problems that are either manufactured for other, underlying reasons or are magnified out of proportion in order to satisfy other demands.
Consider the rationale for creating language centers as units separate from programs of literature. The argument in favor of such centers is generally couched in economic, administrative, and educational terms. Since the economic and administrative reasoning is intertwined, we may consider the two together. Language centers, it is said, are more (cost-)efficient units, concentrating (i.e., centralizing) resources and interests. But this notion is based on two related misconceptions. First, that a bigger, newer unit simplifies things. Think Washington, DC. Create a new committee and watch it grow…and grow and grow. The second misconception: that all languages may be structured, taught, and, in essence, treated the same way. This is simply not true. Both assumptions ignore a basic reality: the more parts to an organization, the more complex that organization becomes. A language center requires more secretarial support, more paper expenditures, more bureaucratic apparatus, in sum, than individual departments. Even more significant is the outlay in teaching staff to accommodate the various languages, the need for more supervisors in the different languages, the need to handle the multiplication of services. One full-time tenured professor alone cannot direct and supervise instructors and TAs in, say, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Russian. Such supervision is a hands-on effort, tailored to the specific language and culture. A language center can be an expensive proposition indeed, as it generates its own separate sphere of interests and requirements, growing farther and farther apart from the literary-cultural heartland. 1
But supposing you are still not convinced that language centers are a luxury no institution of any kind can afford. After all, don't language and literature have different educational goals? Shouldn't they be housed separately? This argument puts another spin on the reductive stereo-type that languages in colleges and universities are simply “services” provided to an academic clientele. Does any other field put up with the kind of condescending administrative ignorance that labels us as “service departments”? Creating language centers simply feeds even more into this misconception. Worse, it threatens to turn creditable language and literature programs into glorified Berlitz schools of language, resulting in a further dummying-down of higher education.
Learning another language is not simply a matter of getting the endings right on the correct nouns and the correct adjectives. Nor is it the triumph of having successfully communicated an order of 50 new copiers, and not 5,000, to a foreign company abroad. The utility of language is a given. To consider language only as a tool effectively severs language from the rich complexities of human endeavor and the cultural-historical workings of the imagination. The instrumentalist view of language does not challenge our students to think, to “translate” themselves through another language into other ways of being or of experiencing culture.
The so-called language and literature divide also reflects antiquated (mis)perceptions about departments of language and literature as, on the one hand, ivory towers of high culture and high theory and, on the other, transit points for masses of students exiting the language requirement. There is, of course, some truth to this picture, but the same could be said for many other fields. The descending (or ascending; depends on your view) pyramidal effect of enrollments is not confined to language classes. Nearly all academic subjects begin with large introductory classes and end with small, advanced classes. Introductory physics has hundreds of students. Only a handful take the most advanced undergraduate courses. Is this an argument for questioning the importance of studying physics? Of course not. To a significant extent, the smaller number of students in advanced, difficult classes is natural. Were there ever mobs of students clamoring to read Montaigne or Wittgenstein or to take advanced classes in cognitive sciences or economics?
More important, I know of no departments of language and literature that aren't grounded in specific linguistic, literary, and historical cultures— and in the notion that what they do is profoundly cultural in essence. The challenge is to create the right balance, fostering the active written and oral use of foreign language while laying the appropriate cultural-literary foundation. If one of the major goals of higher education is to encourage the integration of knowledge and creative thinking, does it make any sense at all to fragment that endeavor even more? A crass market mentality is at work here, furthering the utilitarian view of language, compartmentalizing knowledge and making knowledge “competitive” through an anti-intellectual process of “supply and demand.” Language centers appeal to bottom-line number crunchers, mind-sets who see “language delivery systems” and the “market penetration” of language enrollments. Never mind that language is a supremely human activity, that nothing is less amenable to such mechanistic reductiveness.
And the real bottom line? No one has yet to show that language centers work any better than the departmental model . I find it amazing that informed, intelligent colleagues should rush into such drastic changes without any serious questioning, without proof that such a change is either needed or workable. Do departments of language and literature need to work more on integrating language, literature, and culture? Without a doubt. Does such integration imply that a department of literature or of literature and culture is a feasible alternative? Absolutely not. Such amalgamations of various literatures simply magnify the problems outlined above and reduce even more dramatically competence in another language and culture. English-only becomes the norm. What an impoverishment! In a very practical sense, our own culture needs some saving of its own, from the increasing and alarming parochialism and insularity with which many Americans view themselves with respect to other cultures and languages. The world we live in is growing more complex and international; no one can function in it without an understanding of how other cultures work, without the communication skills to bridge differences and translate ideas and experiences from one language and culture to another. Despite the often touted “Americanization” of other countries, national cultures, as we all know from reading the papers and viewing CNN, are alive and well. They enrich and complexity the world. Creating general literature programs and isolating language from culture and literature are dreadful mistakes. We should be concentrating less on who is teaching language and literature and a lot more on what we are teaching.
Noël Valis
Johns Hopkins University
1 This paragraph owes much to a telephone conversation I had with Sander Gilman (8 Apr. 1996).
DOROTHY JAMES'S call to eliminate the dichotomy between the two branches of leadership in the profession of foreign languages and literatures and her analysis of that dichotomy seem to me exactly right. The literature professoriat's separation of teaching and research in literature and language, and its clinging to a dwindling number of tenured literature positions while relegating language teaching to part-time and nontenurable faculty members, has indeed been self-destructive of the profession in the ways James describes.
But since this damage is largely self-inflicted, perhaps it can be self-corrected. Moreover, I believe, as I think James does, that this separation rests in part on a conceptual problem—an inadequate awareness of the relation between advanced communicative competence and literary understanding. So in this brief comment I want to discuss a positive proposal she makes and deal a bit more with an issue she raises—namely, the relation between literary research and teaching, on the one hand, and language competence, on the other.
We need together to go back to the Curricular drawing board and create coordinated language, literature, and culture programs, enmeshed with vocational training where it exists, programs that will attract and retain the many students who want to learn languages, programs that connect with high school programs where possible and where not, connect with graduate schools, so that language learning and teaching can take place on a continuum across a five-to-eight-year period. We need to re-create continuous language sequences taught at all levels (if not in all sections) by full-time professors, sequences that can stand scrutiny from year one as serious contributions to the content of the liberal arts curriculum and that also teach language skills up to and through the graduate level. (James 10)
As a person who has spent much of his adult life trying to master Japanese, I begin by pointing out that, for certain languages, that continuum might need to be longer than eight years. I make the point mainly to argue that the continuum and the sequences James suggests are crucial, not the length of time. But mastery does require time, even if the study is intensive (as I believe the early and intermediate phases of language learning must be).
Second, as someone who uses Japanese language as a way to study Japanese philosophical and religious thought and literature—for much important philosophical and religious thought is actually done in literature, as Albert Camus noted—but who also uses it in governmental negotiations as chair of the United States government's Japan–United States Friendship Commission, I want to argue that we need to rethink the role of the knowledge of literature in “communicative competence.” I have been a longtime supporter of the movement to emphasize communicative competence in language instruction. But we seem to have lost sight of the obvious—that for a well-educated professional, dealing with peers in their native language, knowledge of their literature and the ability to deal intelligently with it in their language are important parts of communicative competence. Attention to this often-overlooked, though obvious, point would do much to shape that continuum and those sequences.
Third, we need to remember that essays, memoirs, and other literary forms (even films) besides novels, plays, and poetry are themselves important forms of literature. Students' language acquisition is greatly enhanced when their interests and other competencies link up with the foreign language literature they are asked to read. James is quite right in criticizing Sander Gilman's statement that “students want to study what we want to teach” (8). I would apply this point both to the choice of literature and to the approaches to its analysis and criticism. It is in the spirit of James's essay to ask, “Do your research and your critical approach help bring the work studied to life for the students?”
Finally, I hold out the hope that, done properly, the creation of this continuum and these sequences need not interfere with the research agenda. Whether it does depends on who we see as the audience for our research and on whether that audience makes a difference in our evaluation of the importance of that research. At some point we have to ask whether the academy's amoeba-like fragmentation into smaller and smaller subcommunities doesn't diminish research rather than enhance it. Writing for only few people who share one's paradigm simplifies greatly he research task at the risk of trivializing the research itself. Writing for a larger group of related scholars who do not always agree on the research paradigm opens up that paradigm itself to criticism. I believe James is calling for this kind of effort, and I support her in that call.
Richard J. Wood
Yale University
I WAS greatly taken by Dorothy James's vision of “one faculty that will work with language in a cultural-literary context and open the doors to the highest levels of literacy for our students” (8). James's recollections of the University of London in the late 1950s reminded me of my own undergraduate days at Duke University and then graduate study at Yale just a few years earlier than James. What gives me pause, however, is her perception of the alteration in language and literary studies since then and her analysis of the problem: the need for “a big change in the way professors now teaching in advanced undergraduate literature programs and in graduate programs view and conduct their professional lives” (8). For, to take over James's governing image, I tend to believe that the problem with our “store” is a matter not so much of management as of marketing.
James's argument is based on her belief that a gaping dichotomy has emerged in our profession between “two kinds of leaders,” the scholars and the administrators: that is, “the top publishing scholars” and “the people who chair departments, who deal with the day-to-day business of staffing courses, of working with faculty members and administrators” (5). Far be it from me to question James's academic experience; I can only report that I am hard-pressed to recognize in it my own experience of our profession.
James argues that “the demise of the traditional foreign language and literature program” has been precipitated largely because our institutions, especially the affluent ones, have tended “to run high-powered, well-staffed language centers and to retain a small elite body of professors to write books and teach literature and literary criticism to a small number of students” (7, 8). As one who teaches at one of those institutions generally regarded as affluent, I can only state that the image is closer to parody than to the reality of Princeton. (To be sure, the English department has shifted the teaching of composition out of the department and into a writing center; but all foreign language instruction remains firmly rooted in the individual literature and language departments.) Of the six full professors in my departments before this year, four have served as chair. (Of the other two, one arrived only last year and has not yet had her turn; the other has put in many years as director of graduate studies.) And our situation is by no means unique. The most recent PMLA Directory (1996) makes it clear that the chairs at most of the leading German departments in the United States, undergraduate as well as graduate, are highly regarded and productive scholars: from Eckehard Simon (Harvard) to Robert Holub (Berkeley), from Frank Trommler (Penn) to Russell Berman (Stanford), from Krishna Winston (Wesleyan) to Gail Finney (UC, Davis); the list goes on and on and certainly does not bear out the impression of any widespread polarization in our departments between scholars and administrators. A quick glance at the CVs included in the most recent DAAD/ Monatshefte Directory of German Studies (1995) suggests, if anything, that the chair is a responsibility that most colleagues with a reputation for scholarship have taken seriously; they do not want it for a lifetime, as was perhaps the style two generations ago; but they understand the need to take their turn. In addition, as a former chair (6 years) and dean (13 years), I have been impressed by the appreciable number of colleagues in Germanics nationwide who have taken on senior university administrative responsibilities: from vice chancellor (Henry Remak, William Lillyman) and provost (Guy Stern) to dean (John Ellis, Russell Berman, Duncan Smith, and others). Institutional history draws me to precisely the opposite conclusion from James's: it is the more productive people who are usually tapped for a variety of administrative jobs, and those who have not served have usually not done so because they were passed over as unqualified, not because they were unwilling.
In my department, which is generally regarded as having one of the stronger graduate programs in the country, every senior professor (with the exception of one holding a joint appointment) regularly teaches language courses at the intermediate level. The teaching of first-year language courses has become so highly specialized that it is best left to the experts trained in the most up-to-date methods. At Princeton that course, led by last year's recipient of the university's Best Teacher award, Jamie Rankin, is regularly ranked among the five best courses in the university. But all of us know that our advanced undergraduate courses are dependent on our success in acquainting students with the senior faculty members before they complete the required second year of language instruction.
James arrives at her dichotomy of “scholars” and “administrators” anecdotally by way of her account of an MLA forum on leadership at which the forum speakers, “stars of the profession,” did not bother to attend the workshops the next day. Conference hustlers have been a source of ridicule on the academic scene (especially in the United States) long enough to attract the attention of novelists from Arthur Koestler ( The Call Girls ) to David Lodge ( Small World ). It has been my observation, also anecdotally, that the “forum leaders” (in James's phrase) who show up to speak their piece and then rush away are, by and large, the insecure, not-quite-first-raters aspiring to the top. The real “stars” have more class and better manners. Our field is of course not unique. I recently attended a conference on international labor relations in Bonn, at which two of the participants (both from American institutions) flew in for the day and then rushed off again, self-importantly announcing the next conferences that they had to attend. However, the most prominent forum speaker, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, stayed for the entire occasion and was conspicuous for his interest and engagement in the work of younger colleagues. And as I survey the list of MLA presidents of the past forty years, most of whom I have known, I am reminded with few exceptions of distinguished scholars who have also cared profoundly about our profession: who, in James's terms, attended the forums and stayed on for the workshops. Do we really value the thoughts and opinions of colleagues who plan so poorly and are so heavily over-scheduled that they are unable to make a contribution either at conferences or, most often, on their own campuses?
Finally, James cites a meeting at Columbia University on the topic “Teaching Language and Literature: A Joint Enterprise or a Lost Cause?” at which the absence of senior professors was noted and lamented by the graduate students in attendance. She draws the cynical conclusion that the professors were “able on Friday afternoons to work in their libraries with a clear conscience while someone else attended workshops on language teaching” (10). Well, if that meeting had been held on my own campus, I probably would not have attended either—but not because I was in the library. Friday happens to be the day when, in the fall term, I meet in individual conference with the students from my intermediate German course to go over their weekly papers—not just for literary analysis but especially for the grammar and style of their German. On most Fridays in the spring term, I meet with the teaching assistants in my (freshman!) lecture course, visiting their sections, inviting them to attend mine, discussing the grading of compositions, and talking about teaching in an introductory literature course. In my opinion, close personal contact and supervision is much more useful to the graduate students (and to me) than larger workshops.
I do not think that management is the main problem in our store. Of course I am not innocent enough to believe that there are not exceptions—faculty members who exploit the situation and claim a “research agenda“ to beg off departmental or institutional administrative chores. In my own experience, the scholarly results in these cases often resemble the ridiculous mouse produced by the heaving and groaning of the notorious Horatian mountain: another unnecessary conference, another edited volume of the work of others. The scholars with substantial accomplishments—just spend a few minutes skimming the DAAD/ Monatshefte Directory —also plan well enough to be able to accommodate many other activities in their calendars. In most departments that I know—private and public, college and university—the real scholars are those who participate most actively in departmental affairs and appreciate the necessity of language training, which certainly does not end after the required introductory or intermediate courses.
The problem, in my opinion, is one of market and marketing. The major dilemma is one that we can do very little about: the American attitude toward the need for foreign language study (or lack thereof). Let me begin with two personal anecdotes. When I became dean of the graduate school at Princeton in 1979, the very first colleague to show up in my office was an economist (a Hungarian fluent in several languages, including German), who urged me to abolish the graduate school requirement for a foreign language in every field. Since I myself had undergone the experience of teaching German to overage and undermotivated scientists and watching (literally) the tears trickle through their beards at their frustration at being unable to master the intricacies of German grammar, I took his suggestion quite seriously. I soon convinced myself that, indeed, an economist needed no German to become a star in his or her field; ninety percent of the publications in economics worldwide were written in English, and the conference language (witness the recent conference in Bonn) was inevitably English. (The two leading chemistry journals published today in Germany will no longer accept contributions that are not written in English.) So it was an easy decision for me, as a professor of language and literature, to propose to the faculty the abolishment of the general language requirement for the PhD. In many fields, German and French are simply no longer the indispensable research tools that they were until World War II. The study of language and literature has, of course, an enormous cultural value, but graduate school is not the place to try to compensate for cultural deficiencies.
Second example: Since 1993 I have been a member of a presidentially appointed German-American academic council: fifteen German and fifteen American scholars who meet twice a year in an effort to stimulate collaboration between young German and American scholars and scientists in every field. It is symptomatic that the fifteen German representatives all speak fluent and often impeccable English; of the fifteen Americans, only three speak German (two of them native-born Germans). And why should they, since, they note, all German academics speak excellent English? Several very senior members of the council have spent happy and productive years at Max Planck Institutes in Germany without learning enough German to decipher the headlines of a newspaper. Do we seriously expect these eminent scientists to urge their students to “waste time” learning German (or French or any other foreign language)? I have also met young American post-docs in biology and physics who are pursuing successful research careers in European laboratories without ever learning the national language. For these reasons I have never been enthusiastic about proposals to teach “business German.” Any student shrewd enough to make it in the business world will soon figure out that he or she can get along very nicely without German; and if the individual is going to invest the time to learn a foreign language, then why not Chinese?
In the face of dwindling enrollments, departments have made what I regard as the wrong move: instead of consolidating our strength, we have watered in down by expanding into areas that often exceed our professional competence. (Please note that I am not speaking here against courses on literature in translation: they lie within our area of competence and enhance our registration figures, but they rarely entice students to study the original language.) What we can do, and what no one else can do, is teach the language and literature of our professed cultures. And it may be that we should adjust to the new reality—actually, the old reality, because in years before the inflated numbers of the 1960s, the registrations in advanced courses and graduate programs were never very large—and concentrate on our strength: language and literature taught in a sensible and well-coordinated sequence, which introduces literature and culture at an early stage and continues increasingly sophisticated language training at the advanced levels. (Here I believe that I am in agreement with James.) However, we have done the opposite: we have offered business German to students smart enough to figure out that they can get along without German. We have expanded toward interdisciplinarity, putting ourselves in competition with departments of history, philosophy, political science, and others. (I make an exception here for film courses, since they involve the language.) Even more, it has been my experience (and this is again a personal impression, subject to correction) that the colleagues we have recently appointed to profess “culture” and other interdisciplinarities are often the ones least committed to teaching language per se. Scholars of literature have an evident commitment to language, but those interested primarily in theory or politics or philosophy often have other priorities. They sometimes point out that they were not hired to teach “language”; and, if forced to do so, they concentrate on “self-expression” and see no need to worry about the niceties of grammar and style (in English or the target language). If our programs are threatened, I believe, the threat arises not from any conflict between “administrators” and literary “scholars” but from our often-misguided attempts to meet, from year to year, the perceived wants of students and the teaching wishes of colleagues with a cultural or interdisciplinary (not literary) agenda.
Given the reality of the present demographic situation, I agree with James, and the students she cites, that we should reduce and control admissions to our graduate programs in language and literature. That is, we should admit fewer students and then move them through at an appropriate pace: time to degree has been increasing steadily in the humanities for many years; but who would argue that the product is better today than it was thirty or fifty years ago? (As one whose eye has grown skeptical from many years of decanal experience, I do not buy the “critical mass” argument one often hears. When I was a graduate student at Yale in the early 1950s, at what was then widely regarded as the leading graduate program in the country, only two students entered in my class.) In place of the missing graduate students, we should once again hire fulltime faculty members to help us teach our language courses; a reduced cohort of new PhDs, plus more fulltime appointments, would go a long way toward resolving the current dilemma, in which close to half of the teaching in four-year colleges is done by adjuncts or part-timers. As for the “stars” who are reluctant to do their share; a firm chairperson with scholarly credentials of his or her own can accomplish wonders of persuasion, using the various enticements of salary, leaves, and teaching assignments. Of course one can still do little about the occasional colleague who is useless in the classroom or in the chair. Every department is entitled to a few mistakes, but mistakes do not need to be rewarded.
In sum, it is not the workers in the store, either salespeople or managers, who need attention, but the stock on the shelves. Academic departments are like specialty shops. We must not put ourselves out of business by diversifying our stock to such an extent that it becomes indistinguishable from that of every other boutique on the street.
Theodore Ziolkowski
Princeton University
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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